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> people who grew up in the 50s. It sounds like a miserable place.

You could literally replace "50s" there with any other time in the not-so-recent past, without affecting the truth of that statement. Technological progress is such a nice thing, isn't it? (In the case at hand, home appliances was what freed women from having to do all that house work. Not politics.)

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50s women had washing machines (unless they were poor Appalachians, like my grandparents). But really when we're speaking of the 50s we're almost explicitly formulating it in terms of white suburbia.

I am speaking solely of the social situation, the psychology of the times, which in part can be summed up in one word 'conformity' (oh, and not to forget segregation, anti-gay and anti-communist hysteria, etc).

Technologically speaking, if I had the New York Library (or equiv) and a typewriter, I wouldn't take it as too much of a step down.

> conformity

This sounds ideal. Today we are largely missing the shared society.

I hate to break it to you, but suburbia are still around in the 2020s, and still very conformist. (PG has lots of essays describing how the residential segregation of suburbia - quite aside from any specificity about race or ethnicity - ends up creating and enforcing conformity.)

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