[forest_dweller]

> It was always thus. In fact, until the ‘60s, a girl had to rely on her beauty and personality to eat and survive, i.e. by marrying.

The way this is framed today by people is soo disgusting.

1) Women did work before 1960.

2) Two incomes are better than one. Married couples are better off financially. Many women worked part time while the children were at school or in the evenings when the husband was back at home. I know this because my grandmother did and many of her friends.

3) A married couple typically provides the best environment for raising children. Most people want children.

4) Most people were dirt poor in the past in the western world by today's standards.

[toyg]

The disgust is very much in the eye of the beholder, I guess. The reality is that priority n.1 for a woman pre-1960s was to get married and priority n.2 was to bear kids; otherwise, men-dominated society would see her as “useless” and ostracise or abuse her, consider her inferior and unworthy, and effectively condemn her to a life of poverty (unless she had an inheritance to manage). That was the case for centuries, or rather millennia; the further back you go, the more violence was so widespread that a single woman (outside the elites) could not practically defend herself in everyday situations, hence making it basically impossible to have an independent life. Being disgusted by the strategies devised to survive this situation is like being disgusted at animals evolving to escape their predators.

We now see the vestigial remains of this “natural state” in western countries, thanks to the changes brought by mass-industrialization and consumerism (both forces being constantly hungry for bodies, and hence working as Great Levellers between sex, race, age, culture, etc) but it’s still very much present all over the world - the problems in Afghanistan or Pakistan are well-reported, for example, but hardly unique.

[i_am_new_here]

> The way this is framed today by people is soo disgusting.

> Most people were dirt poor in the past in the western world by today's standards.

You have just adjusted one simplification to end up over exaggerating another one. A boomer's family could live off one salary. Since then women have joined the workforce and kind of the whole world by moving (migrating) or remote. While it is definitely true that those "none westerners were dead poor in the past compared to today" there is a 20+ year long wage stagnation in the west and increase in prices on some of the very fundamental needs like housing, which results in memes about gen XYZ not being able to afford them, create stable conditions, have a spouse and then a family (kids).

Anyway, we are in this together, always on(line), connected, one global world and it depends how you view it: Appreciate the advancements the non-western world has made or focus on the gap they still have to the west. Though this all comes to the expense of the western world, which is kind of required to close the global gap.

[forest_dweller]

The wage stagnation relative to inflation started happening 1960s-1970s, so that was well after the time period we were discussing (pre-1960s).