Comparing social lives: interview and observational analysis

¶ … person whom I spoke to is approximately 30 years older than I. She was describing her childhood experiences when her parents were divorced and the fact that she had to grow up in as conflicting family.

Firstly, she described to me at length how she felt that her mother was often frustrated that she had to be a housewife. Her mother mus multi-talented and seemed to be interested in books, in languages, and in many different factors even though she was largely self-educated and barely made it through high school. It was life experiences, she felt, that primarily shaped her mother and gave her mother astute understanding in others that many university graduates with years of learning lacked.

Indeed, in the 1980s her mother entered the social work field and became a successful social worker. The interviewee (lets call her Barbara) added that had her mother been enabled to do this earlier and had her mother possessed the degrees, she may have gone far further than she actually did.

In those years (the 1940s / 1950s) it was the father who earned and the mother who had to stay home. In fact, had Barbara had any of the few jobs allowed to women in those days (such s teacher, nurse, or secretary) she would have almost inevitably had to relinquish the job as soon as she got married. Certainly having children would have compelled her to stay home and surrender any promising career direction she may have otherwise taken.

Barbara remembers how she was ridiculed in school for coming from a 'broken family'. Broken? "My family was not broken' she told me. Living alone with her mother was far preferable than living with her father too whom she was terrified of. "We had the happiest, most closet life together" her mother cared for her and went all out for the children. Her siblings, who were older than her, to this day resent their father for what he did to the mother. Each of them were aware of his open mongerings with other women and his physical abuse of their mother. Her mother remained half-paralyzed to her death because of something her father had once done to her. They could not call the police. It was the woman who was held to blame. Her siblings refused to speak to their father ever afterwards.

The father remarried and Barbara spoke to him only once in her life. She too, though to a lesser extent than her siblings, never liked him and refused to have contact with him. Had her mother lived nowadays, she felt, her mother might have had far more resources aside form which it would have been easier for her mother to far earlier gain the divorce that she wished, she (and the children) would have received far more support, and her father may have been held accountable. The amazing thing in Barbara's case was that she emerged as healthy and wholesome as she did going on to have a happy marriage, becoming a nurturing mother, and raising wholesome children. She attributes all of this to her mother's influence.

There is one other way that I noted a difference between Barbara's time and my own. This was the way in which a divorce was carried out and I'm not sure whether this was particular to Barbara's own experience s or to that of general society. Barbara woke up simply to find her father gone. Her mother simply mentioned that he would return some day. He never did. Her sister took her aside and said that it was something called 'divorce' -- she had no idea what this was, and that she should not tell her friends. Barbara, 6 at the time, was surprised that divorce was considered such a bad thing; to her it was good.

She reminisced that it reminded her of the few funerals that she attended in her day where children most times did not attend funerals and one day saw their closest relatives here and the next day gone. They were often told that they would see them one day or that they had gone to heaven -- a message that perplexed the students. As an aside, Barbara told me that a boy when being told this and seeing the coffin of his grandfather put into the ground, commented "but I see him going into the earth."

Taking the funeral point, a favored teacher of Barbara was once reprimanded when she dared to tell the class something about death and that the bereaved student may not necessarily see her parent one day. Too many things were unmentionable.

Barbara's contrast with nowadays was extreme in so many ways.

It has only been comparatively recently, for instance, that divorce has become more accepted. In 2005, for instance, it was reported that 51% of women are living without a spouse, up from 35% in 1950 and 49% in 2000. Women are marrying later today than they did then or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods (Roberts, 2007).

Although divorce as late as the 1980s was criticized as being an unhealthy situation for children and families were often instructed to live together rather than divorce, it was increasingly discovered that divorce was far better for children than living in a conflictual atmosphere.

Today, certain conditions are put in place to mitigate the crisis of divorce: both parents and children receive counseling, the focus is placed around the well-being of the children rather than the well-being of the parents (or more accurately still that of the male), and guardians ed lietem are sometimes appointed to ensure that the child is receiving the best care (Cherlin, 2009). None of this was existent in Barbara's time.

Other differences include the fact that women have far greater access to a range of jobs than ever before and that women can appeal to sexual discrimination laws to intervene in discrimination on the workplace.

Women, too, can hold prestigious careers in almost any field they wish once married regardless of whether or not they have children.

An abusive male will be held accountable today and can end up in jail for the kind of treatment that Barbara's father imposed on her mother. Barbara's mother would have had resources despite the fact that she came from a disadvantaged background. Barbra too would have been referred for counseling.(Cherlin, 2009)

Children today too are, from a far younger age, made aware of all acts of life. They are certainly aware of death and there are far less taboos existent now than then.

On the whole, life seems better now than then. However, as Barbara also mentioned, neighbors seemed more supportive and community life seemed more close. There was also a warmer family existence that did not obsess itself with TV and Internet to the extent that it does today.

Children felt safer and more protected; life seemed more predicable and orderly; and people seemed to have more genuine and authentic friends than they do today.