A stop-off for a cup of coffee opened my eyes to the amazing progress women have made in the last 60-plus years.
Up until the late 1950s, women, once married, were usually expected to be stay-at-home housewives, who cooked and cleaned and depended solely on their spouses financially.
I was in a coffee shop packed with young mothers with babies and/or toddlers. High chairs were occupied and baby buggies filled a quarter of the room. The screaming, crying, belching and high-pitched laughter was truly a cacophony. And the babies were even noisier!
Boom! Boom!
As the waitress brought my cappuccino, I said, “There’s a lot of mothers and babies here this morning!”
She gave me a withering look and said, “Well there usually is on Mother and Baby Morning!”
I observed that every mum had recently visited hairdressers and nail bars.
While their fashionable clothes weren’t from Bond Street, they were definitely not cheap chain store purchases.
Co-incidentally, in complete contrast, the previous evening I’d watched a 1962, black and white episode of “Z Cars” which featured a stressed housewife in her mid-20s, trying to make ends meet, relying on her brute of a husband for money to pay for food, utility bills and the rent on their drab little flat.
As was the ‘fashion’ then for all housewives from 21 to 101, she wore a functional pinafore dress; no make-up; and couldn’t afford to visit a hairdresser or (had they existed) a nail bar.
Besides, new nails would have broken off the first time she scrubbed her front doorstep, a quaint daily ritual that disappeared along with whistling milkmen. Only the rich could afford washing machines and vacuum cleaners.
“Z Cars” was a TV series that, like the kitchen sink dramas of that time, was grittily authentic. That stressed housewife character, old before her time, would have been recognisable to many viewers.
Sipping my cappuccino, I reflected, if the housewives of 1962 could see those ‘yummy mummies’ buying expensive coffees and cakes, they’d be astonished at the huge change in their lives. And they’d probably think, “What the hell is a skinny latte?”