Post #1301724

2026-04-11 09:39 UTC

People always find it strange when I say the biggest reason for womens liberation happening is because of hitler, but it's true. Prior to America entering WWII, men went to work, women stayed home and did the dishes. That's just how life was. Then all the men needed to go overseas. But that left huge holes in the domestic workforce. Life simply couldn't move forward without someone to stock the shelves of a grocery store, or fix cars, or drive the city bus. Work that up until then was historically men only. But....there were not enough men between 1941-1945 to fill the roles across all forms of work, but work needed to get done. So women were brought into temporarily fill the roles until the men got back. Then the war ends, the men come back, and suddenly the women don't want to go back home and do dishes. So now you've got women back home, who want to be back at work, and men at work seeing more and more women not leaving. And over the next decade or so, more and more women either never left the workplace, or came back to work. And then you had the homes where the men wouldn't let their wives work. Which caused fights. And even though they were individual fights, these same fights were happening all over the country. As more women realized they aren't alone, it became less of a fight with your husband, and more of a fight against traditional gender norms. And thus the womens liberation movement really gained traction. And it all goes back to hitler creating the environment that allowed the whole butterfly effect to start. And thats what you're seeing with trump and linux. Hitler didn't give a damn about womens rights. But butterfly effect, he's the biggest reason it happened. Trump doesn't give a damn about Linux, but here we go again.

Replies (2)

@booly@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-11 12:59

To be clear, women's work before World War II was more than just the dishes. If you look at the guidebooks published for housewives back then, you'll see that they were expected to have quite a few skills that most households now generally outsourc to external businesses: * Feeding the family. This was more than just cooking. They were expected to process foods from a much less processed state (much more butchery of meats and cleaning and processing of vegetable products, dairy products, baked goods), and then preserve foods for out-of-season consumption (pickling, preserving in jams/jellies, home canning, drying, and in some cultures smoking). Much of this work is now done by the industrial food processing industry so that we can buy cans or jars or boxes of the stuff that's already processed or partially processed. Even our fresh foods have been cleaned and sorted and trimmed to mainly just the edible parts. * Making and maintaining textiles. We see bits of this surviving into knitting and crocheting as hobbies, but back before the rise of cheap apparel it was important to be able to clean and repair clothes that we'd now just take to our local dry cleaner. * Maintaining the house itself. Home improvement is masculine coded today, but a lot of the stuff that qualifies as home maintenance was traditionally the work of a homemaker. Plus things like heating the house required active involvement of keeping fires burning and fuel on hand. * Making household consumables. Homemakers were making their own soap, their own candles, and all sorts of little tools. The economic shifts that come from women leaving the home for the paid workforce are all over, and some of them are pretty pronounced. But it's important to remember that women worked hard before they ever got paid for it. Life was toil.

Open ##1301729
@Doomsider@lemmy.world 2026-04-11 14:57

Absolutely bizarre thing to say. The first liberation of women in the US was 1837 when women were allowed to control their own property. The second big liberation was securing the right to vote in 1920. The issue with what you say is how women were treated after the "boys" came home. As other responses pointed out Women have always worked. The change was the type of work. They were forced out of their new roles. This was not liberating at all. In fact, it was quite the opposite know your place kind of adjustment. I suppose you could make an argument that this created an eventual backlash where the first women won the right to equal pay in 1961-2. You have a point about more women working after this time, but it was not equal as they were forced into "pink" color jobs. I would argue the war really lead to more exploitation of women. Hitler's murder crusade inadvertently lead to women being exploited even more than they were before by US capitalism. I suppose it did prove that women could do the job of men, even if their society didn't respect them.

Open ##1301730