[DoreenMichele]

Men being uncomfortable making small talk with female colleagues for fear of it being misinterpreted by someone strikes me as a serious barrier to female professionals successfully networking.

It also strikes me as an unfortunate happenstance and not a conscious and intentional plot to deny women career advancement.

[msrenee]

We're talking about the 50s. There was almost no fear of repercussions from being inappropriate towards women in the workplace. You might run into an angry husband or brother, and that was about it.

It was the height of the housewife era. Women were actively discouraged from working and there was a massive amount of clear and outright sexism towards those who chose to have a career. It seems much more likely to me that they didn't consider her an equal part of the team and that's why she was left out of the story.

[DoreenMichele]

If you actually want to be faithful to your own wife, you might fear it being misinterpreted by the female colleague as you hitting on her.

The height of the housewife era was funded in part by the high savings rates during WW2 when many married couples were de facto DINKs -- dual income, no kids -- because she was Rosie the Riveter, he was serving in the military overseas and, as Lucille Ball once said, you can't exactly get pregnant by phoning it in.

Furthermore, most scenarios contain myriad factors and I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.

[anonymouskimmer]

> The height of the housewife era was funded in part by the high savings rates during WW2 when many married couples were de facto DINKs

Sure, but it didn't help that women were encouraged (or forced) to leave their jobs so that the returning men could have them. It's not coincidental that "Kelly Girl Services" and the general temp agency (which has been so much bad for both women and men in terms of wages, job security, and promotion opportunities) took off in this era. Or Freidan's best-seller status in 1963.

> I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.

Blame helps in figuring out what to address. At the very least a sense of past injustice motivates people in the present to address present wrongs.

It's important to cast blame for the actions and attitudes of people, because the basic motivations behind those actions and attitudes don't change, they're effectively eternal with the human race. The light needs to constantly be shined on them, or you get women like Eileen Bailey and Ann Coles[1], or men like Eddie Slovik[2]. The shining of the light is the path forward, or at least a part of it. Does it matter whether COVID came from a Chinese lab or a wet market, now? No. But the shining of the light on the bad practices at both places is the most likely way to see that both sets of practices are corrected. (I do think it was stupid to cast blame back in 2020 and 21, when really we needed to be better addressing the critical urgency of contagion.)

1 - https://daily.jstor.org/what-really-made-1950s-housewives-so...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Slovik#Execution

[DoreenMichele]

I don't agree with you at all. I don't even know what ugly thing you are trying to say about the three people you named.

If you look for someone to blame, you will find someone to blame. But that someone may be a scapegoat.

The US legal system is based on an assumption of innocence. I find it personally useful to try to assess history from an assumption of innocence.

Many phenomenon are emergent phenomenon that cannot be blamed on any one thing.

If I think someone is actually guilty of something in specific, I have no problem saying that. I just don't find an assumption of guilt useful in the general case for parsing how to do this better.

[anonymouskimmer]

> I don't even know what ugly thing you are trying to say about the three people you named.

> If you look for someone to blame, you will find someone to blame. But that someone may be a scapegoat.

For Eileen Bailey I first blame her husband cheating, and then I blame his friends at the tennis club for not letting her know about it.

For Ann Coles I blame her husband for his personality disorder, and a society that told women to deal with it.

For Eddie Slovik I blame conscription, which may not have even been necessary in WWII following Pearl Harbor[1]. And an attitude against youthful petty criminals from the lower classes (this continued for decades as petty criminals were encouraged to join the military to get their lives in order and avoid their sentences, at least according to pop culture).

None of these attitudes (save, temporarily, conscription) have materially changed. People still cheat on their spouses. Spouses are still (though much less so today) told to accept it. Friends of the cheater still don't always feel they can, or should, let the other spouse know. People are still told to address societal issues by changing, or medicating, themselves. Youthful offenders are still permanently tarred in the mind of society.

We have improved in considering divorce more acceptable. And this is partly because of a collective blaming of the cheating spouse (with the other part mainly being the increased frequency of divorce).

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Training_and_Service...

[DoreenMichele]

For various reasons, I've read a lot of research on human sexuality.

It's nice when two people can make their marriage work and be happily monogamous. It's unfortunate that we collectively haven't yet sorted out how to establish happy monogamy more reliably.

For your second example, blaming someone for their personality disorder isn't reasonable. People don't wake up one morning and go "I think I would like to acquire a personality disorder for funsies." It's unfortunate that humanity has yet to establish a solid track record for fixing mental health issues.

Last, according to the link you submitted in your previous comment:

Although over 21,000 American soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II, including 49 death sentences, Slovik's death sentence was the only one that was carried out.

I still have no idea at all what or who you are trying to blame with your third example or what you are trying to say you wish were different.