Here's what the 1950s were like.
Nostalgia relies on fuzzy memories. Let's refresh ours.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, Elvis Presley bought Graceland and the Wham-O toy company started selling the Frisbee.
In July of that same year, I was born. I'm little hurt this never shows up on those internet timelines of the 1950s, but I'm a woman in America. I'm used to being overlooked.
Today, I am your resident, non-historian expert on the 1950s, and here's why: The Public Religion Research Institute recently released a survey in which 70% of Republicans said our culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s. This was a steep increase from the 54% who felt this way in 2020, when Donald Trump was president.
The survey findings reflect a partisan divide, which these days could be said about everything from our decision to get the COVID vaccine to our preferred method for making popcorn. (For fun, extol the value of an air popper at your next gathering and see who burst into flames over canceling the canola oil.)
Anyway, 63% of Democrats said we're better off than we were in the 1950s. As for the self-declared independents, 57% think we're better off. This could change in a few days. The politics of mediocrity is always a moving target.
More than half of the 2,508 who were interviewed were age 50 or older; another fourth were 30 to 49. Most of the interviewees (1,780) were white. They still are.
Nostalgia relies on fuzzy recollections. Perhaps a brief stroll through the Before Times of the 1950s will sharpen our memories.
Walk with me.
No reliable contraception
Before the birth control pill became widely available, in the 1960s, married women had no reliable contraception within their reach. Sure, they could say "no" to their husbands, but denying sex to the breadwinner of the house was culturally excoriated as evidence of The Bad Wife.
Yes, contraception existed, but it was not as reliable as the pill. And so, as PBS put it, "young wives faced three decades of childbearing before they reached menopause." (PBS didn't launch until late 1969. No Sesame Street!)
We are ignoring what the absence of the pill meant for unmarried women who liked sex. A woman's lust was not a culturally acceptable version of womanhood in conservative America.
My this sounds familiar.
Gay rights didn't exist
If you even appeared to be anything other than heterosexual, you were at risk of a lifetime banishment from your family and your community. You could legally be fired from your job. Newspapers and courtrooms routinely criminalized homosexuality, and violence against the LGBTQ community was commonplace.
These were the options for our fellow humans: Dwell in the shadows as you hide your true identify for all your life or be an outcast for as long as you can stay alive.
By the way, the word gay meant you were merry until the late '60s and '70s, when it began to mean one was a homosexual. This linguistic evolution prompted many straight Americans to accuse gay people of stealing their gay, thus illustrating the fragile state of heterosexual joy, which endures to this day.
Television: Black and white and basic
No color TV in most homes yet. No Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, either. There were basically three network stations on which virtually all the news was delivered by white men. This may have affected one's perception of the world.
Among the most popular TV shows: The Honeymooners, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy. Lots of stay-at-home mothers waiting for their husbands to get home. Lucy managed to get in a lot of trouble, but her husband worked nights. Connect those dots, Mom used to say.
We were decades away from smart TVS, flatscreens and online streaming. I'm remembering the time when someone asked on Twitter what our families used to call the TV's remote control in the '50s and into the next decades. My one-word answer: Connie.
What were 'blended' families?
In the 1950s, an American family was defined as a two-parent home consisting of a husband and wife and as many children as they could produce in a marriage that remained intact no matter how dysfunctional.
The concept of "blended family" did not exist, and biracial marriages were against the law in more than a dozen states, mostly in the South. It took the Supreme Court to change that, which it did in 1967 after Mildred and Richard Loving sued the state of Virginia.
In this, my 17th year of a second marriage, I think a merger of two families, which is now so very common, is best described as tossed, like a salad. So many flavors and colors.
I kept my name when we married. That wouldn't have happened in the 1950s.
Laws to protect women didn't exist
Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, a woman could not get a credit card or open a line of credit in her name. Before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 we could be fired for being pregnant.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, prohibited discrimination by employers based on race, color, sex, religion or national origin. We now have more job opportunities beyond teacher, nurse and secretary, which is why you are able to read my columns. I understand we aren't all celebrating this particular development.
Of course, the fight continues. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 requires companies to pay women the same amount they pay men, and we all know how that's working out. The 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade legalized a woman's right to an abortion, but we are now awaiting a decision by this current court that could gut these rights. If you're longing to return to the 1950s, this court's for you.
Fighting for Civil Rights
Until 1955, most Americans didn't know or care about laws that forced Black people to sit in the back of buses until Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, thus launching the year-long Montgomery bus boycott.
That same year, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket for the mangled body of her Black 14-year-old son, Emmett, who was murdered by white supremacists. "Let the people see what I've seen," she told the funeral director. A photo of her looking at the brutalized body of her dead son ran in newspapers around the world.
No one was ever convicted. Earlier this month, the U.S. justice department announced that it was closing the investigation of his murder. "I did not expect that they would have found any new evidence," his cousin Ollie Gordon said in a news conference. "I ask, 'Where do we go from here?'"
How were those household conveniences convenient?
The major appliance was called Mom, who was regularly depicted as vacuuming in high heels. Even in this apron, she looks more glamorous than I did at my wedding.
Only the wealthy had dishwashers. Hair dryers were hoods and bonnets, Jell-O molds were a competitive sport and using cloth diapers was nothing to brag about, as they were the only option. Girdles and long-line bras were standard armor, day and night, as opposed to today's Spanx, which limits our suffering to those times when our self-worth has plummeted to the size of a shelled peanut.
The Wonder of white bread
The family staple. Void of fiber and nutrients and so moist we could squish several slices together to make a baseball. Yum. The packaging doubled as boot bags. Slip it over your shoes before ramming them into your rubber boots and you, too, could avoid having Mrs. Candela yank you across the cloakroom floor as she tried to pull them off before school started.
Suffocated by smoking and ads everywhere
By the early 50s, studies had already shown that smoking kills people, but tobacco companies didn't want us to know that. Instead, they came up with the idea of "filters" to deceive the public into thinking we could inhale billows of carcinogens and be cowboys, too. The U.S. surgeon general did not issue a warning until 1964. Even after that, the industry had free rein to continue its television advertising until the early 1970s.
Tobacco companies still find ways to peddle their products. As the CDC reports, cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans a year; 41,000 of those deaths result from second-hand exposure. Worldwide, more than 7 million die each year because of tobacco use.
From the CDC's warning: "If smoking continues at the current rate among U.S. youth, 5.6 million of today's Americans younger than 18 years of age are expected to die prematurely from a smoking-related illness. This represents about one in every 13 Americans aged 17 years or younger who are alive today."
At least the government lets us know now.
Buckled up for safety? Nope
No law required even a lap belt in cars until 1968. Car seats for infants and small children were not required by law until 1985.
We prefer not to think about what happens when a car of unrestrained children is involved in a collision. Thanks to Ralph Nader, we don't have to.
Medical gains and stumbles
In the early 1950s, polio was one of the most feared diseases in the U.S. because of its high infection rate among children. In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected. More than 3,000 of them died. The vaccine arrived in the mid-1950s. Polio was eliminated by 1979.
Successful kidney transplants began in the mid-1950s, but there were no heart or liver transplants until the 1960s. Doctors prescribed the sedative thalidomide to ease morning sickness for pregnant mothers, with disastrous outcomes for tens of thousands of newborns around the world. Some were stillborn or died soon after. Others were born with severe disabilities.
The common treatment for women with breast cancer was an extended radical mastectomy. Most surgeons ended this practice in the 1960s because it did nothing to improve outcomes over less invasive procedures.
Depression was mislabeled and misunderstood. People with mental illness were routinely viewed as lunatics and defective and locked away in asylums. Prozac, the first of antidepressants classified as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), was not available until 1988.
Feeling the nostalgia?
Sweeping in on my Dansko clogs – you were expecting heels? – to say, Wow, what a decade, right?
One more fun fact from this latest survey, on page 18: "Republicans who most trust far-right news outlets (98%) and Fox News (89%) agree that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity."
There's something that didn't exist in the 1950s: Fox News. Getting a little misty eyed here.
However, we did have right-wing Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against the imaginary threat of Communists in America. He made up stuff about innocent Americans and ruined their lives.
That would never happen in Congress today.
Connie Schultz is a columnist for USA TODAY. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, "The Daughters of Erietown," is a New York Times bestseller. Reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz
