Nifty Fifties

‘IF you remember the Sixties, they say, you weren’t there. If you remember the Fifties, the truth is you weren’t spending enough time on your knees scrubbing the floor.

Now the housework was done, Jane couldn’t wait for her husband to come home

Ah, the Fifties. You can almost hear the sigh of nostalgia from the offices of the Daily Mail as it recalls its favourite decade.

‘You’ve never had it so good,’ Prime Minister Harold MacMillan told women as they listened to Housewives’ Choice while washing up their husband’s breakfast things.

And it is a message reinforced by this morning’s Mail, which discovers that women 50 years ago were in better shape than their modern counterparts.

Whereas 1953 woman burnt off more than 1,000 calories through their domesticated lifestyle, today’s woman sheds only a little over 500.

Modern woman also consumes a lot more calories than her 1953 version – 2,178 against 1,818, according to the research by Prima magazine.

‘Women in 1953 would spend three hours a day doing the housework, an hour walking to and from the shops in the town centre, an hour on the shopping itself and another hour making dinner,’ the Mail explains.

‘Many had lunch to prepare too, as many husbands came home to eat in the middle of the day.

‘Today, women drive rather than walk, have freezers which mean fewer shopping trips and use supermarkets which provide everything under one roof.’

And some of them even have jobs, although only to earn a bit of spending money before they find themselves a husband…

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Posted: 5th, August 2003 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink