My mother

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. Thank you for sharing this.

Back in her day a woman who married and had children was then almost always locked into being a wife and mother. "Career women", invariably single, were universally scorned and looked down upon.

Not only Mona Lisa Smile, but both the movie The Best of Everything (1959) based on the 1958 novel of the same name by Rona Jaffe clearly depict what it was like in that era. You also get a pretty accurate picture of the time in the show Mad Men, even though that takes place a bit later. Through the 1960's women could work or get married and have children. By the time I entered the workforce in 1966, the typical working path was to get a job and work until you got married. Then, it was more typical to work until you got pregnant with the first child. Yeah, there have always been women with children who worked, but they were for a very long time not seen as the norm and were largely ignored.

There has been an unfortunate reversal in opinion in that these days a stay at home mom is often scorned.