How accurate are portrayals of 1960s housewife cooking in media?
Posted by AmIAMom@reddit | AskAnAmerican | View on Reddit | 206 comments
I was recently watching a show, and I was really fascinated by the food meatloaf, casseroles, etc., because where I’m from, that’s the kind of quick weekday dinner working mothers would make. Were those actually the staples of American home cooking, and if so, was it financially motivated? The idea of a stay-at-home wife/mom is unheard of where I’m from unless you’re wealthy, so I just always assumed that this was a romanticized version of the ’60s, and that women were in the workforce and shows set in the ’60s are just ignoring that fact. But were housewives a thing among the “lower classes” as well? Or is there a completely different reason I’m just ignorant of?
Immediate_Abalone_59@reddit
Stay-at-home moms were pretty common when and where I was growing up, in the 1960s and 70s in the American South. We were definitely not wealthy, but not really poor. I would say we were lower middle class. My dad was a geology professor at a small college and was only paid for 9 months out of the year unless he could teach a summer class or run a fossil dig over the summer. They had to save very carefully. Mom and Dad had our entire half acre of land planted in fruits and vegetables. Even the trees were fruit or nut trees. Mom was constantly canning or cooking something. I think homemade food was cheaper, and casseroles and meatloaf are two recipes that can extend the meat or make use of cheaper cuts. I don't ever remember Mom using a meal kit like Hamburger Helper or Chef Boyardee until she went back to work when I was eight. Homemaking is not romantic. I could tell she was working hard. My clothes were either hand-me-downs from my brothers or homemade on her Singer sewing machine.
Outlaw_Josie_Snails@reddit
To be honest, it’s hard not to feel a bit skeptical about your post. When you start weaving in modern buzzwords like "Trad Wife," "food deserts," and "paid daycare", "paid maternity" into a conversation about 1960s cooking, it sets off my "troll alarm."
It feels a bit like you’re taking a checklist of trendy Reddit and TikTok grievances and trying to retroactively apply them to a completely different era of American history.
That being said, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I realize that if you’re looking at the U.S. from a Slavic background, our history probably looks like a total paradox. What you see as "quick working-mom food" was, for a 1960s American housewife, a symbol of a modern, convenient middle-class life.
The disconnect here is that you're comparing a subsistence-based culture (cellars, home-grown rabbits, multi-hour broths) with an American culture that was obsessed with industrial progress and "leisure time" through canned goods and appliances.
The way you frame the "better system" back home and drop terms like "food deserts" is pretentious, condescending and annoying.
It feels like you’re trying to "fix" or judge a culture you haven't fully grasped yet. However, I can see you’re genuinely fascinated by how different the labor of feeding a family looks across borders.
If you can set aside the TikTok terminology and look at the U.S. through the lens of 1950s/60s industrialism rather than modern social media, the "culture shock" you’re feeling might actually start to make sense.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
I'm sorry I didn't mean to sound offensive or as a troll at all, it's just that most of the things I know about the US is from US media, and I'm fully aware that you can't use that to actually understand someone's culture or background. And I was watching the show Why women kill (I'm fully aware that it's not reality or a documentary and it's fully fiction, that's why I asked real people here), and I just found the meals one of the main characters was preparing fascinating, because I applied my culture and history to it, which is something my brain does automatically, to compare how my grandmother's life and cooking would've looked like in the 60s and it kind of struck me because as someone who uses social media I see how red pill people talk about the 60s housewife dream, and I'm well aware that they are talking about the US experience of that time, so looking at someone cooking meals, that would be considered "simple" in my grandma's home, I just find it fascinating because honestly for me stay at home mom always screamed wealth and privelege so the realisation that that wasn't the case, because of things I just didn't realise until I started to get real people's replies, like childcare accesibilty, if you read what I wrote it was in response to someone who explained to me how the US system worked for them and I'm aware that it will be different for everyone, but it struck me because I am so used to our own system, and in no way did I mean to judge or criticize your culture, I was just explaining my background to show where I was coming from and where my ignorance of this stems from, if that came of as boasting I apologise, that wasn't my intention. When it comes to the food desert comment, I just went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how come my own family that was very poor, could afford so much food to feed so many and I realised that it's because our culture is based on the fact that historically (that tradition is very much dying) food was mostly home grown, and I'm aware that the food desert comment was pretentious I didn't know how else to call it, when you don't have personal access to home grown food, and I shouldn't use terms, that I don't know the true meaning of. I was just super curious and fascinated by this topic, because it's something I never thought about even for a second, and once I started to think about it and notice it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I am really sorry I came off as rude or as if I wanna say my culture is in any way shape or form better, that just honestly wasn't my intention.
Working-Office-7215@reddit
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, canned and prepared foods were considered modern and futuristic. Most Americans families live in detached single family houses, where one could have a home garden, but having easy foods was considered progress away from the drudgery of gardening and spending hours cooking. For the vast, vast majority, our supermarkets are and always have been abundantly supplied with fresh ingredients (did you learn about when Khruschev briefly visited an American supermarket)? We have come back around nowadays, and society at large values fresh ingredients, but unfortunately a lot of people have become accustomed to processed foods (thanks to advertising, ease, low cost, and addictive taste combinations) - it is now more middle and upper class families leaving behind processed foods, and people in poverty tending to have overly processed diets. But 50 years ago, processed foods were viewed as modern and exciting.
Baebarri@reddit
In the 60s nothing was "quick." No microwave, no food processor. Casseroles were King because they could be put together early and didn't require full attention while cooking.
SAHMs didn't want to spend all day in the kitchen. They had many other chores and errands to do.
Normal-Sprinkles6799@reddit
Most women didn't work outside the home in the 1960s or 70s. My mother always made a real dinner that you're seeing...meatloaf, chili, stew, fried chicken. She sometimes fried chicken for breakfast. I probably didn't know 5 women who worked. Father never made much $$ but was never in debt. Bought a new car every other year, cash. Seemed normal.
Per_sephone_@reddit
It's accurate. It was like that through the 1970s in America. It was the 1980s when everyone's mom went to work.
huazzy@reddit
Granted I don't know where you're from OP but Meatloafs and casseroles aren't "quick" meals. They actually require a decent amount of prepping and cooking time.
However, I would agree that they are considered "cheap" meals given the ingredients they require. But I doubt the reason they were made are financially moreso than practical.
Yes. Stay at home wife/moms were very common in the past.
nathanwilson26@reddit
Casseroles and meatloafs take 20 minutes maximum to prepare, then are bake in an oven. That was very much an example of state of the art quick meals for the time.
NeverRarelySometimes@reddit
If you get home by 6 and need the kids in bed by 8:30 or 9 on a school night, dinners that require and hour and a half from start to finish are simply not doable. And not quick, by any stretch.
nathanwilson26@reddit
They were prepared ahead of time and put in the oven when the parent got home.
CarolinCLH@reddit
If we are talking the '60s, the time where many mothers stayed home, the available ingredients and tools were very different. I don't remember my mother using any ready-made sauces or spices. There were spices available, of course, and you hand measured them. I don't remember bread crumbs being available at the store. If we wanted quick bread crumbs, we mashed up some crackers. Tomato sauce was available as were canned vegetables. If something needed to pureed, well there was a mixer. Chopping was done with a knife. Crock pots didn't come out until the early '70s. So, even meat loaf was not a quick prep.
DjinnaG@reddit
Some casseroles (definitely not lasagna, for example), sure, but meatloaf is a much longer prep time, even with modern chopping tools and purchased breadcrumbs
nakedonmygoat@reddit
Actually, a vegetarian slow cooker lasagna takes only minutes to prepare, then you just set the slow cooker to do its thing and go on about your day. No, the cooking time isn't fast, but prep is super quick. Use a slow cooker liner and you've just saved yourself a lot of cleanup, too.
It's a great way to have a lasagna dinner ready to go on a Sunday night, or prep one to reheat for Monday after work.
DjinnaG@reddit
That’s not a casserole, though it sounds like a great idea that I should try soon. In the past, the lasagna noodles had to be preboiled, and vegetarian food wasn’t considered a proper dinner, so there definitely would have also been time for browning the meat.
The liners really are the way to go, they are a great recent addition. I’ve seen a lot of people look down on others for using them, saying that they’re only doing it because they’re trendy or something, when it’s like no, I’m using them because they are a great modern tool that saves a helluva lot of time and effort. The old school ones, you were lucky if the big heavy part came out for easier cleaning
charlottespider@reddit
Meatloaf takes maybe 15 minutes to pull together. What makes that meal quick or slow depends on the sides. A baked potato and veggies that roast while you bake is quick. Mashed potatoes and sauteed veg is slow.
Spirited_Ingenuity89@reddit
Eh, my meatloaf recipe uses grated carrots and puréed onion. I think it takes more than 15 minutes to pull together. I generally make it as a meal prep, though, so I can’t remember how long it takes to only make one batch.
charlottespider@reddit
With a food processor, you spend more time putting the thing in the dishwasher than you do pureeing stuff. It's still not 30 minutes of prep work with a box grater.
Spirited_Ingenuity89@reddit
I don’t have a food processor that grates, so yeah, it’s a box grater. And I use a blender for the onion. But I’m saying that since there are several steps that can’t be accomplished simultaneously, it ends up taking more time. Like I can’t mix up the meatloaf until I do the carrots and the onion, and those can’t be done concurrently. And when I’m meal prepping (which is always with meatloaf), I’m weighing everything to make sure it’s divided equally. It’s not as slow as doing something like meatballs (which I often prep at the same time as meatloaf since the ingredients overlap significantly).
I agree that I could probably pull it together after school/work, but I’d prefer to have the carrots and onion prepped before I leave for school pickup.
DjinnaG@reddit
Exactly, there are a lot of steps that have to be done separately. I’ve even tried using a rotary grater for the onions, since it’s so much faster for other foods, but doesn’t really work for onions. Grating the onions is a minimum five minutes task with a box grater. Do those, put together the panade, mix the eggs, etc, there are a lot of steps that each take 2-5 minutes for the easy ones, and the total is closer to 45 minutes, even if you have shortcuts (purchased breadcrumbs and meatloaf mix meat) that weren’t commonly available or cheap in the past. There’s a reason why there are so many recipes came along that involve adding a can of soup or a packet of soup/dip mix.
The little steps add up very quickly, and that assumes that you are throwing all of the dishes to the side to wash while it cooks. Technically you aren’t doing active cook work while you clean up as it’s in the oven, but it is still time that you can’t use for doing things unrelated to the meal.
getElephantById@reddit
"What do you want for dinner?"
"Oh, something quick. How about I make a whole casserole and bake it?"
NoCarpet9834@reddit
Casseroles and meatloaves take 20 minutes prep time only if it's open a container, bottle, etc. and dumping, with maybe a quick stir. Make the sausage for a lasagne, brown sausage (or cook off other proteins), grate the cheese, make salsa. Wilt the onions. Prepare the trinity. Those all take time.
charlottespider@reddit
I don't consider lasagna a "casserole". Too fancy!
Ok_Olive9438@reddit
I want to disagree a little here. Casseroles do require cooking time, but they can be assembled pretty quickly if you are using canned ingredients, and they make a meal that is good for more than one night.
It’s also a food older children can be taught to make, as it’s mostly assembly, then baking. My Oma worked full or part time, and was a big fan of magazine recipes (Good Housekeeping). My Dad and all of his siblings know how to cook well, and learned pretty young.
Dragosal@reddit
Cooking time isn't a problem my oven from the 80s has a timer you can set when to start cooking
Ok_Olive9438@reddit
I think there are some food safety concerns with that... letting the casserole sit in the over at room temp all day. That is a risk I have decided not to take with my crockpot, which also has a delayed start timer.
mp85747@reddit
We're all different regarding the risks we take. I, for instance, will never leave any cooking appliance on while I'm not home or even sleeping. Never trusted tech all that much.
Limp-Plantain3824@reddit
That and what if I get stuck at work and get home 2-3 hours later than planned? It happens often enough.
Janeiac1@reddit
Just FYI, if you prep the crock the night before and put it in the fridge, then put that chilled crock into the heater base set to low before leaving for work, dinner be ready when you get home with no temperature concerns.
Limp-Plantain3824@reddit
That and what if I get stuck at work and get home 2-3 hours later than planned? It happens often enough.
riarws@reddit
You’re right, but in the 60s there wasn’t a lot of awareness of such things.
Illustrious-Shirt569@reddit
So, if I leave at 7am for work and leave a raw meatloaf in the oven set to start cooking at 5pm, that would seem reasonable to you?
huazzy@reddit
A lot of dishes can be assembled quickly but if they require 45+ minutes of baking I'd say it disqualifies them from being considered "quick".
To me, "quick" is boiling pasta, dumping a can/jar of sauce and being done with prep/cooking in under 10-15 minutes.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
I'm slavic so I'm just looking at it from a very specific lense of pretty strict cultural rules surounding food and especially feeding men (these rules are stupid, and I don't agree with them, but some still persist), to this day pasta wouldn't be considered food enough to feed a working man, so things that take under an hour would be considered quick weekday dinners, I don't want to come off as talking down about this at all, I have imense respect for stay at home parents and all the work that goes in it, but it's a cultural shock for me, one I find really fascinating, I guess it just never occured to me that food, outside of ingredients obviously, can be viewed differently depending on culture, if that makes sense
UnhappyToNiceToSay@reddit
You got to think of a dish pasta like perogi: just take apart and made differently and you will see a meal. The dough is the pasta parallel. Perogi filling = ingredients on the sauce (meat like in perogi z miesem is like the meat in a Bolognese sauce; cabbage or cheese perogies, similar cheese or veggies in the sauce. The sauce is like frying your perogies in butter or serving or with sour cream. Carbs + ) potato perogi would just be a gnoci pasta. Pasta sauces can be tomato or cream based too and in North America often involve cheese, either way.l, often as a topping. It is not all that different. It is just culture. People add lots to pasta!
MillieBirdie@reddit
The closest thing to that is most Americans think a real dinner needs a meat. So if pasta includes a meat sauce then it's a good dinner.
FuckIPLaw@reddit
A meat, a starch, and a vegetable would be the traditional American expectation. I think it was explicitly taught in home ec classes back when all the girls took that and all the boys took shop.
MyUsername2459@reddit
Those strict cultural rules definitely are not normal in America.
We are a LOT more flexible with rules around food in the US.
tara_tara_tara@reddit
I am a 58 year old woman and I was a young child in the 1970s. I would never, ever in a million years think of making dinner to feed a working man.
I grew up in a household where my father was a teacher and my mother worked a regular corporate job. My father did most of the cooking, shopping, laundry, and other things that people think women are supposed to do because he was at home for more hours of the day than my mother.
I would never, and at almost 60 I feel like I can say never, put up with a situation where a woman had to do more work at home than a man.
It’s interesting that you point out that you’re Slavic because my mother‘s parents immigrated to the United States from Poland and because they were so poor, both of my mother‘s parents worked very long days. Her older sisters made dinner for the family. She didn’t have any brothers.
Their culture didn’t matter when it came to eating. Having food was all that mattered.
Dr_Watson349@reddit
Pasta doesn’t count? That’s fucking hilarious. Poor Italians.
ilanallama85@reddit
Right, to OPs point about “working mother weeknight meals, you can’t leave work at 5 commute home, heat up the oven and get something like this cooked and on the table before like 7:30 pm, which is too late for dinner for young children. Unless eating that late was typical in the 60s - I don’t really know. As a parent I think it would be too problematic in any time period but I guess a lot depends on when your kids go to bed.
Dangerous-Safe-4336@reddit
Most Americans then had dinner before six.
ilanallama85@reddit
Yeah there’s no way you’re getting a casserole on the table by 6 if you are working a 9-5, preprepared or not.
Dangerous-Safe-4336@reddit
Exactly.
Saltpork545@reddit
Hi, I'm a food nerd. Jarred pasta sauce in America kinda started with the dude who became Chef Boyardee, but really began in earnest as a common commodity in supermarkets and American homes in the 1970s. So about 50 years ago. Your idea of a quick meal is only about 50 years old at the oldest.
Casseroles were considered 'quick' dinners for the reasons others have explained here and as a cultural staple of certain parts of the Midwest they have held on because of this. If you can spend 10 minutes in prep, you have dinner and leftovers for anywhere from 4 to 6 people. 10 minutes of work is pretty freaking good for that amount of calories, particularly when compared to the other options of the time. The era of the American casserole really began in earnest in the 1930s to the 1950s, partially due to the influence of Campbells trying to get people to buy canned soup concentrates.
If you can make 4000 calories of food for the same amount of work as it takes to boil 1 potato, you can easily see why people say it's a 'quick' food.
MillieBirdie@reddit
Yeah but quick is kind of relative. If the 45 minutes it takes to .ake requires 5 minutes of mixing and then 40 minutes of baking while I can do a different chore, then that's 'quick'. Meanwhile a dinner than takes 30 minutes but requires 10 minutes of chopping, 5 minutes of mixing, and 15 minutes of sautée-ing, and I have to give it my full attention the whole time, then that is not 'quick'.
rawbface@reddit
"Quick" is "I just got off work and it's almost the kid's bedtime, wtf can I feed them"
Illustrious-Shirt569@reddit
Yep, this is the case for me. I get home and the kids need to be done eating in less than an hour. I can do an hour in the oven on the weekend and be reheating leftovers during the week, but whether it takes 15 or 90 minutes prep before the 45 minutes of baking is immaterial because I am not home 45 minutes before dinner needs to on the table on a weeknight.
This seems like the precise difference between what I consider working parent and at-home parent meals. Flexibility of time (and access to your own kitchen) in the hours leading up to the meal.
WulfTheSaxon@reddit
But for a stay at home mom it’s quick.
Ok_Olive9438@reddit
Though... its 45 minutes of bake time on night one. It's a few minutes of reheat on night 2.
pmgoldenretrievers@reddit
"Quick" is relative. For me quick is I don't need to spend much time doing it. In other cases, like yours, quick is it is done fast.
t-poke@reddit
Yeah, last weekend I threw a pork butt on the smoker. 10 minutes of prep, followed by 16 hours of cooking. But I consider that a quick meal because for those 16 hours, I could do anything else, including sleep, going to the gym, running errands, and sitting on my ass watching TV.
12B88M@reddit
The same for anything made in a crock pot/slow cooker.
Prep takes 20 minutes at most, then 8 or more hours of waiting.
It's common to start it before heading to work then dinner is ready when I get home.
huazzy@reddit
I mean... sure. But what kind of comparison is that?
It's like arguing that driving a Toyota Yaris 120 mph will get you to a destination quicker than driving a Ferrari 30 mph.
Yes, it's true but I feel like its a flawed comparison.
MillieBirdie@reddit
Not really, it's just looking at real practical considerations. If I'm a busy housewife and can make a dinner that takes 5 minutes to prep but 45 minutes to bake that still saves me time because I can spend those 45 minutes doing something else.
huazzy@reddit
Huh? No. A practical consideration is the same housewife forgoing the dish thay takes 45 minutes to bake and making a dinner that takes 10 minutes to make from start to finish and having 40 minutes to do whatever else they need to do.
MillieBirdie@reddit
There's not a lot of dinners that only take 10 minutes to make.
DjinnaG@reddit
For real. Even plain pasta takes longer than that, because the water takes time to heat up, before the eight+ minutes cook time, followed by draining
huazzy@reddit
The time you wait for the water to boil is less than the time you need to wait to preheat the oven.
MillieBirdie@reddit
The only things I can think of that genuinely take 10 minutes or less are salads, sandwiches, and maybe stuff with no meat. Or breakfast stuff like eggs, oatmeal, etc.
Anything else is longer unless you don't count, like you said, water coming to boil or chopping time.
Standard_Plant_8709@reddit
As a person who cooks from scratch every single day, there literally isn't a difference, because you can still do whatever else you need while your food is in the oven. Or even on a stove. You don't need to stand by and watch something cook.
MillieBirdie@reddit
The only time it actually makes a difference is if you literally have a time crunch, such as you get home at 5 and need to eat by 5:30 because you have to leave again at 6. In that case yeah the meal that takes less than 30 minutes from start to finish is more practical. But if you don't have those kinds of restrictions then it is often more time efficient to cook something with quick prep and longer cooking/ baking.
Like I love making chili cause it's maybe 10 minutes of sauteeing and dumping stuff in a pot, and then I can let it simmer for as long as I want and go do whatever I want.
GotMeAMuleToRide@reddit
I agree with /u/MillieBirdie. My personal definition of "quick" weighs heavily on the amount of time the meal requires my attention. How quickly I get to eat is irrelevant.
Although I also consider clean up. Some meals require more than others.
lindakurzweil@reddit
Prep for meatloaf, casseroles, sauces (from scratch) etc. can be time consuming. However, in my weird brain, they are “quick” because when dinner time comes, it’s easy to put dinner on the table because most of the work was done earlier.
Competitive_Doubt392@reddit
fr those meals are like total staples but idk if they were super practical or not
1nfam0us@reddit
A book you moghtbfind interesting on the topic.
The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
Thank you so much, I'll definitely read that, as someone foreign who only knows the US cultrure through media, it's sometimes difficult to look at it without actually having the immedeate background to understand what's true and what's fiction
CaddyJellyby@reddit
Also Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro.
1nfam0us@reddit
It can be hard. Our media profoundly affects even our perceptions of ourselves.
You might also be interested in Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
slonermike@reddit
It’s been sitting on my shelf for years. I need to crack it open.
Someone lent it to me after I went on a passionate rant about the prevalent conflation of American values and Christ’s values.
1nfam0us@reddit
It will be the most validating reading you ever do then.
Gallahadion@reddit
This was a good read. I haven't read The Way We Never Were, but it's been on my reading list for awhile.
Limp-Plantain3824@reddit
That looks good!
RedRedBettie@reddit
I read this in college and it's a great book
Quix66@reddit
No, most women in the 60s did not work outside the home in the US.
That’s what the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s was all about.
There were some really poor people where that was the exception.
My family is Black. Most women in my family did work, as did most of the women we knew. The common jobs for Black women back then was working maids for White families and taking in laundry.
ELMUNECODETACOMA@reddit
To expand on this for non-USans, it is a little nuanced. While _most_ women didn't work outside the home in the 60s or even the 70s, it was fairly close. 37% of women in the 60s, and 43% in the 70s. Probably even higher in highly urbanized areas (and correspondingly lower in rural/exurbs).
Limp-Plantain3824@reddit
It is nuanced, absolutely, but once you bring data to the party it’s clear that women working outside the home has been more common and for much longer than people “remember.”
shelwood46@reddit
And often when they say women on farms didn't "work" they just mean they didn't get paid, they still did the farm work and often the bookkeeping and many other tasks directly related to running the farm, not just the household. But they didn't "work".
Quix66@reddit
Exactly why I said didn’t work outside their homes not didn’t work at all.
IthurielSpear@reddit
As a child from the 60s from a working class neighborhood, the majority of women in my neighborhood did work. Most of my classmates mothers also worked.
Quix66@reddit
Yes, that’s why I said poorer families.
IthurielSpear@reddit
I don’t think we were poor. Solid middle class, though. Working class
Quix66@reddit
Working class is not middle class. It’s means poorer people.
Live-Ad2998@reddit
Most of the moms in my town and my family were stay at home moms. My mom gave piano lessons and did music at our church. They didn't relax all day. There was a lot of work.
Dinner was meatloaf, burgers, pan fried chicken, roast, mac and cheese (these were all main dishes) baked breaded fish. Pork chops, all served with vegetables from our huge garden. We had a hot breakkie, usually crepe type pancakes, a packed lunch with a basic sandwich.
We canned bushels of fruit and tomatoes in the summer and froze beans, corn, peas, berries, cherries.
this_curain_buzzez@reddit
You had breakkie in North Carolina?
Live-Ad2998@reddit
I have been influenced by the kiwis. But yes. Crepes. We didn't call them that. They were skinny pancakes.
Loisgrand6@reddit
Ikr?
Only_Presentation758@reddit
Very much middle class/lower middle class housewives. Meatloaf, casseroles, stews, canned fruit in gelatin molds
bull0143@reddit
Yes, they were staple foods. In my region (upper midwest) supply chains weren't what they are now. It's still somewhat expensive to source fresh produce in the winter now; in the 50s and early 60s most people got a majority of their fruits and vegetables from cans or home-preserved jars during the winter. Refrigerated rail cars came on the scene at this time, so fresh produce availability and variety improved beginning in the mid to late 60s. It took a bit longer to expand to rural areas.
ProfessionalCat7640@reddit
Those foods are still common. There were and still are stay-at-home moms, but they are much less common today. In the past stay-at-home moms could be lower, middle, and upper class because it was more commonly found that all moms stayed home to raise kids.
Today it seems like stay-at-home moms are either very poor or rich; near poverty level moms who want to stay at home but often receive welfare services to balance the cost or are rich, trophy wife types. Every mom in the middle typically has some kind of employment. But I must admit, maybe this is just my personal perspective and others may feel differently.
UnhappyToNiceToSay@reddit
Housewives were not a lower/working class (urban) phenomenon in North America. You need context. In rural communities, women work in the home and on the farm as well. Not working for obvious pay, but self employed. You get urbanization in North America and you get well paying employment for men. The women cannot really contribute to the family's business (husband's work ). now but wages are sufficient to support the family. Wife is left with the housework (& community involvement/volunteer work). Boom, housewives. Working class women keep working in urban environments. In lower paying work. Paid work was very gendered and there were fewer jobs for women. In the late 1950s, the employment rate for was just under 33% -- nearly 1/3rd -- of married women were working for pay in the USA. Participation rate for women kept growing through the 1960s and was about 38% by 1970. So plenty of women worked, but they were mostly NOT middle class women. They worked in blue collar roles (textile and cotton mills in the south. Others worked in garment and apparel factories, often as seamstresses or assemblers. Some light industries, such as electronics assembly, also primarily employed women for routine, repetitive tasks. There were shoe factories etc that employed women ) AND they worked in "pink collar" work (clerical, telephone operators (after the initial use of young men was deemed a disaster),, typists), in domestic and private households as nannies, cleaners, cooks, maids, launderess, etc. women also worked in institutions like hospitals as nurses, nursing home aides, cleaners, school cafeteria workers and teachers. These kinds of jobs were often restricted to young unmarried women until laws changed.(Also true for waitresses, store clerks, waitresses, and airline "stewardess", though sometimes officially, sometimes just by custom.). So marrying often meant loosing a job, if you had one in the 1950s...sometimes you could stay until you got pregnant. So a lot of different things pushing towards creation of middle class American housewives in the 1960s.
LetterheadClassic306@reddit
stay at home moms were actually pretty common across classes in the 1960s, especially before the women's liberation movement picked up steam. meatloaf and casseroles were definitely staples because they stretched expensive ingredients like meat with cheaper fillers. my grandma made those all the time and she wasn't wealthy at all. the media portrayals are somewhat romanticized but the food part is pretty accurate for that era.
Lucky-Remote-5842@reddit
I guess I'm not really understanding the question. Meatloaf and casseroles as opposed to what? Are you doubting meatloaf and casseroles? Are they too "quick" to be acceptable? What would be an example of a not quick meal? I am curious, not trying to be condescending or dismissive, I'm genuinely wondering what about these meals is surprising. I know cultures are different, that's why I ask. What are some meals you would you expect to see a 60's housewife cooking?
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
I didn't mean any offence by the question, I meant more like where I grew up it would be very common to have homemade soup/broth, some form of meat with a veggie/broth based sauce and dumplings/potatoes, side salad and some dessert, let's say similar to bundt cake, and this would be a weekend meal because it would require several hours of cooking, and physically being in the kitchen which would be imposible to do during the weekdays, because the women worked, sometimes even more than one job. For example my grandma in the 60s had a day job, 3 kids and then worked nights in the local pub, so things like meatloaf would be a common weekday dinner with mashed potaotes because it doesn't require that much time being in the kitchen physically and she could do all the other work that needed to be done. I'm not comparing those two by any means, I undesrant there are massive cultural differences. I guess and I don't know why I just always imagined, especially with the way people romaticise it today that it would look like the tradwife influencers, and the fact that it was like normal cooking and not extreme labour is quite shocking to me.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
Also just remembered the term food dessert and I'm not sure if that plays a role into this as well, majority of the food my family would eat was home grown, so the most common meat was rabbit, because they were always plenty, and most stews/sauces were broth/veggie based and majority of the veggies/herbs would be home grown and bones fat etc. would be incredibly cheap from the butchers and you'd only buy meat like pork or beef and that would be a pretty rare treat, things like venison or wild boar would also be used pretty commonly. And you'd go to grocery stores mostly for out of season fresh fruits, otherwise evryone has a cellar filled with jams and pickled veggies, flour, salt, sugar, spices and bread. So maybe also access to fresh food would play a role in this?
Actual_Eye_3301@reddit
The food in the 1950s was healthier, fresher, and less processed than it is now. I only know the areas I’ve met people from, and can’t speak on the history of food deserts.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
I somehow fell into a 60s spiral today and just the amount of like canned foods and premade dinners and things like that so I was wondering why that became such a massive thing, and then it hit me that most people in the US unless directly living on a farm probably didn't have full access to homegrown fruits/veggies and even meat like we did, and I'm probably way off with the term food desert, but I don't know why this is such a big cultural shock to me :D I'm used to the fact that if you have even the smallest space of what could be considered a garden you're gonna use it as much as possible to grow your own food, is that not a thing in the US? I'm sorry if I sound crazy I'm just hooked on this topic for the day :D
nakedonmygoat@reddit
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, since this is a legitimate thought process.
The women of the '60s and '70s had mothers who had lived through the Great Depression and WWII rationing. Canned foods had been around for a long time, but magazines for women during those years were full of recipes for what to make with all those canned things, and how they could save money. They taught this to their daughters. It was the granddaughters born in the '60s and '70s who walked away from that and wanted better.
It was never that one couldn't get fresh foods. During the lean years, it was about limited growing space in cities and suburbs, limited money, economic uncertainty, and during the war, rationing. These things can have a long generational memory.
Obviously I'm generalizing. People in the US have all different kinds of upbringings, no matter when they were kids. But some of the big trends and tropes you see from the '60s and into the '70s were very much generational, based on those difficult years in the '30s and '40s.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
Thank you so much, it means a lot to me that people are kind enough to share their personal family stories with me, I wrote this because I was genuinely curious. I guess I came off ignorant, and honestly I learned so much, so I'm very grateful, tbh I never thought about women in the workforce because culturally women have always worked where I'm from, and not working was considered a show of wealth and privilege. And to now see just how ignorant that take is and that women genuinely couldn't work, had to stay home and support their families that way, is opening my eyes to a whole new way of struggle I never really knew existed. I do feel bad for sounding too ignorant in the comments, english being my 3rd language I can sound silly
Working-Office-7215@reddit
Americans don't really have the culture of eating soup before a meal. At-home dinners are usually one course (in the 1950s this usually meant meat, starch, and a vegetable), with maybe a dessert afterwards. Americans don't really sit and linger for meals. Also, I'm not sure what Russian schedules are like (I spent a semester in St. Petersburg but lived with a retiree), but Americans are more like northern Europeans than southern Europeans; many of us put our kids to bed early (e.g. my 5 year old goes to bed at 6:30pm) and, so even when SAHMs were the norm, moms still wanted something quick and easy to make after the kids came home from school. That said, American habits in general vary widely.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
The soup thing is really interesting, but appetisers aren't a thing here unless you're in a posh restaurant, so even school lunches or factory cafeteria lunches you always get soup and then some main course, the same with dinners, so this is very fascinating, I think also there's a difference in the lunch culture, where people in the US, if I understand correctly eat a lot of sandwiches, or like cold meals (don't know the right term for this), where here even in very hard manual labour jobs you sit down for lunch and it's usualy several courses, the break won't be longer than 30ish minutes but still and I'm eastern European so I can't even imagine how that compares to someone from the south of Europe.
When it comes to bedtimes, there are actually 2 very famous factors, in many stricter households kids weren't allowed inside until 5pm, it was expected that you'd get home from school drop off your things and leave to do whatever and not come back until 5pm. There's a very famous kids TV programme that started in the 60s so that parents wouldn't have to read to their kids anymore and it starts at 7 so, after 7 would be my assumption for bedtime.
Nowadays I guess it depends, in a modern urbanised household, it's anything you make it, in a more traditional household the rules remain similar as to what they were, but again it depends to what you make of it, there is still a lot of judgment from the older generations, but that's universal :D
Working-Office-7215@reddit
I would guess people are 50-50 with cold lunches or hot. Schools serve hot lunch (e.g. milk, slice of pizza or cheeseburger, salad bar/warm vegetable (kids choose), piece of fruit, milk) but a lot of kids pack a lunch (often something like a sandwich, juice box, chips, fruit). My kids are about 50-50 whether they get hot lunch or cold lunch.
At work, my colleagues and I usually pack leftovers that we heat up in the microwave. When I was in a bigger city (and at a higher paying job), we bought food out a lot more or had it delivered. We also had a work cafeteria but it was pretty pricy (but good food made to order). If I don’t pack a lunch, I get salad bar at the grocery store down the block, or maybe a burrito bowl or sushi or avocado toast. I tend to snack on fruit and nuts during the day so often don’t eat a big lunch. I eat while I work so I can leave earlier.
We also have a similar divide between older and younger generations :)
PrincessWolfie1331@reddit
I was born in the 1980s to a mom born in the 1940s and a dad born in the 1950s. I was raised to be thrifty and money conscious.
On one occasion, I went grocery shopping with my mom as a teenager. She told me to go grab individual pudding snack cups for my lunch. I came back without them and told her to not buy them because they are too expensive.
I still feel guilty (in my 40s) by not having the cheapest order when I go out to eat. Like I want to know what everyone else is getting so that I can pick a cheaper option.
I add water to shampoo, conditioner, and body wash bottles to stretch them out longer.
Aloh4mora@reddit
My parents had two gardens, and we all needed to work then to grow vegetables for the summer. We also had a rhubarb patch. This was in the 80s and 90s in Minnesota. One garden was for tomatoes and the other was for everything else, and every year we switched the locations so the soil could replenish.
My mother was raised on a farm in the 50s and 60s in Washington State. They had a HUGE garden, and also a berry orchard. Canning and preserving foods was a way of life and they didn't use the grocery stores much. Town was far away and difficult to get to, so they were as self sufficient as possible. Of course they had to buy things like flour, salt, lard, coffee, sugar.
In general, subsistence farming is a backbreaking form of labor, with very irregular results. Some years the weather is good and you produce a lot. Other years, not so much.
As Americans move to the cities and have less space, less time, and more money, the norm of growing a ton of food yourself fades away.
When I bought a house, I of course started a garden; I thought it was just part of life. But the soil where I live is very poor compared to Minnesota. I had to buy good soil at the garden store (!!!) -- imagine buying soil! Then I didn't have time to start tomato seeds from scratch, like my mom did, and I bought large tomato plants. Etc etc etc.
Meanwhile, my time was being more highly compensated elsewhere. It felt like a waste of time to go out and water the tomatoes twice a day -- plus, water is expensive here. I often neglected to water the garden, meaning the plants didn't have what they needed to grow well.
Then that year, the weather in Seattle was terrible all summer. In the end, I only harvested 4 little tomatoes! And they weren't very good! I spent over $120 for everything (soil, plants, stakes, fertilizer), and a lot of time (although I should have spent more time watering), and got only 4 tomatoes.
That was the year I decided that it would be better to spend that $120 at the farmers market, where I can buy fresh tomatoes that someone else grew, and spend my own time on other things. So I don't have a garden anymore.
RedRedBettie@reddit
my grandma had a rhubarb patch, in Washington state. She made the best pies
Aloh4mora@reddit
I still have a rhubarb patch, because it requires no effort at all! 😂
RedRedBettie@reddit
that's great! I'm jealous!
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
Many middle class suburban households have vegetable gardens. We grow raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes, green beans, herbs, lettuces, summer squash, and, occasionally, winter squash. I depends on how motivated I am to plant in the spring because despite what you may have heard, supermarkets in the U.S. offer a huge variety of fresh fruit & vegetables at reasonable prices.
Tricky_Jellyfish9116@reddit
My grandparents all grew up on American farms around the 1920s-1940s, where they did have big kitchen gardens, crops, and livestock, and they all used fresh food and preserved their kitchen produce by canning, drying, pickling, etc.
Still, they all loved grocery-store canned and frozen food in the 50s and 60s when it became available because it was fast, easy, and also simply popular! Newspapers and magazines often printed recipes that would use commercial food products, which were advertised as time-saving for busy moms. Even the aunts who owned a dairy farm LOVED Cool Whip (non-dairy whipped cream substitute, sold frozen in a little plastic tub) because it represented such a time savings over separating their own cream, whipping it by hand, and then having to deal with its short storage life.
Still, my grandparents and also my parents did keep growing their own food throughout their lives. My dad's major retirement project is turning all of his land into a food garden with lots of perennials in addition to the summer vegetables. That's very common for rural Americans and also normal, though less widespread, for suburban people with some land.
For people in urban areas, it's very common not to own or have access to any land at all, and there are places where gardening is rare due to soil quality or climate. I love my family tradition of gardening and food preservation, but I mostly kill my outdoor plants in short order because we've moved from a temperate climate with rich black soil and regular rain to a desert with hard clay and alkaline soil. People do garden successfully here, too, but it takes a lot of work on the soil (with compost, manure, adding minerals; even just buying garden soil and growing in pots and raised beds) and constant attention to watering, and I'm still terrible at it.
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
My grandmother (b. 1914) married into a large farming family in 1949 (second marriage), and her introduction to his many, many siblings after they started dating was a rabbit dinner. She grew up in the nearby city and had never had rabbit, not even at the height of the Great Depression. As I recall the story, she did not care for it. My Grandpa's family also ate a lot of venison. In addition to farming, his brothers were avid hunters, which was necessary to feed a family of 13 children.
pbjarethewurst@reddit
American with Eastern European immigrant husband and inlaws. My in-laws are the same-a brothy soup followed by meat and starch are required for a 'real' meal. In general, I'd say current generic American culture doesn't include the need for a soup (or dessert) as part of a regular home meal. In fact, my inlaws are horrified that I serve thick soups and stews as entire meals which is pretty common at least in the winter (chili, chicken noodle, beef stew, etc).
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
Agreed. We eat soup/stew with a side of bread and butter for dinner frequently.
Actual_Eye_3301@reddit
They didn’t have hours to cook, but from what my mother (born 1950s) and grandmother (born 1930s) have told me, the wife would have a full meal prepared everyday when the husband got home from work. My grandma would also change her clothes before he got home and put on heels.
I will say they did not have hours to cook like you might on a weekend in your country. They had kids, running them around, taking care of the house, and running errands. They also had more kids than we do now. I was a stay at home mom in current times, and now I work, and during neither time period have I been able to spend hours in the kitchen daily. Kids would have died.
A stay at home wife with no kids may be different, but based on what older Americans have told me, women usually worked until they had children. They typically stopped when they had their first.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
For us in the 60s it would be usually grandparents, great grandmother, and usually 2ish younger families like 2 brothers their wifes and all the kids so commonly you would have around 10 kids under one roof, but there was the big "village" factor once the kid hits around 2 and becomes more self reliant, so it does make sense that there would be more time to spend on these things, compared to one generation living situations, but to be fair all the women and most the kids worked by the time they were 14/15 and especially if they worked outside the factories and agricltural cooperatives etc. then they also worked nights and weekends, so that would also impact the time. I just find it super fascinatinghow such a simple thing like cooking dinner for your family can be so significantly different just culturally
Actual_Eye_3301@reddit
That’s fascinating! Yes, single generation home are the norm here. Makes sense if the labor is spread out more!
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
I think you meant to write two-generation home, i.e., parents and children.
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
So the corollary to that for many Americans would be a roast dinner on Sunday including a hunk of meat, like a pot roast, or a chicken with two vegetable sides and a starch, like potatoes. The leftovers would be used to make a casserole or used for sandwiches, and the carcass would be boiled for stock to make a soup or stew. This is something many families, including mine, do today.
Lucky-Remote-5842@reddit
Oh, I see what you mean. I'm sure it depended on the household. My grandmother in the states worked too. Meatloaf, chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes with everything, spaghetti with meat sauce, meat and vegetables, like pork chops, game meat, chicken, hamburgers, etc were common weeknight meals.
Stay at home moms, I feel like the country moms cooked bigger meals than the city moms. Country people were more likely to be home making food for husbands who were in the fields all day. City moms might be out socializing, volunteering, etc, and come home before kids got home from school, start dinner and have it ready when husbands came home from work.
catatethebird@reddit
What you're describing isn't that far off from a typical meal my grandma would make. She was the typical 50,s housewife, did secretarial work before getting married, then stayed at home (with maybe some work for family businesses when the kids were older.) I'll have to ask my dad if her remembers any meals from when he was a kid, but she was still cooking for the family in the late 80s/90s when I was a kid. Meals would typically include a main with meat, which indeed might include meatloaf or casserole, a starch like potatoes or pasta, some kind of gravy or sauce, several veggie dishes and sides, and almost always a side salad and bread with butter, and a dessert like bread pudding, coffee cake, etc. She definitely was getting recipes from magazines and the newspaper and enjoyed trying new things.
If she said "We're having meatloaf for dinner," it was understood that all those other items would be present. I'm sure that really varied across families with different levels of cooking skill and budget, and some meals of meatloaf were just meatloaf and mashed potatoes with nothing else.
No_Description2301@reddit
I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s and this was the norm. My mother and virtually every other mother in the neighborhood were stay at home moms. That was the norm until the late 70’s when women’s liberation and the bad economy sent many women into the workforce. At least that’s how it was where I lived.
Firm_Baseball_37@reddit
When I was a kid (70s and early 80s, not 60s), and before my parents divorced and my mother went back to work, casseroles and meatloaf were staples. Also burgers, franks and beans, and other "American" food, plus gnocchi, pirogi, potato or apple pancakes, and other ethic stuff.
So probably an accurate menu. And we were reasonably middle-class when my parents were married. American midwest.
Jcamp9000@reddit
I grew up in the 50s and 60s. In my whole huge neighborhood, there was only one woman that worked and that was in the Father’s business two days a week. All other mothers were home, cooking cleaning and taking care of business. Taking care of the kids, etc. This was a fairly middle class neighborhood, but even in the less affluent area areas, women did not typically work at that time.
MercuryRules@reddit
My mom was a stay at home mom for some of my childhood. She hated cooking. We at Mexican, a lot, because she loved it. Now she just buys it in the store or at a restaurant.
FormerlyDK@reddit
In the 50s and 60s almost all my friends had SAHMs. So my mom wasn’t really focused on quick meals. She did make meatloaf sometimes, but we didn’t have casseroles except sometimes lasagna. Meats and fish, mostly.
Fenifula@reddit
I grew up in the 60s in a California suburb. We were lower middle class with 5 kids. Dad worked several jobs to make ends meet, while Mom stayed home. There weren't a lot of jobs available to women at that time, and none of them would have paid well enough to make the time away from home worthwhile. Mom cooked, sewed, cleaned, took care of babies, oversaw our schooling and chores, took care of the garden, used her artistic talents to support Dad's job responsibilities, fixed and decorated around the house, scoured the sales and coupons to stretch out food money, and just generally made sure things ran smoothly. No one could accuse her of being under-employed, though she didn't work outside of home.
We had a weekly progression of dinners: meatloaf on Monday, chicken on Tuesday, Italian-ish casserole on Wednesday, pork chops on Thursday, fish on Friday, etc. There was always a meat, a starch and a vegetable. The food was predictable but always good. Everything made from scratch. Us kids were at school all day and then playing outside afterwards, so we were hungry, ate it all and washed it down with plenty of milk. There was usually homemade pie, cake or cookies for dessert.
One thing it may be hard to picture nowadays about life in those times is that women were not even allowed to work most jobs. Unless a woman was available to work full-time as a teacher or nurse, or make a long commute to the city to work in an office, there just weren't many jobs available. There were some jobs at department stores and waitressing, but those went to women who were unmarried and childless. Jobs were even separated in the newspaper want ads into Help Wanted - Male and Help Wanted - Female.
Easy_Yogurt_376@reddit
Yes. It was extremely common and even women who worked were still expected to take on those roles since things were generally still gender-based. If you were working class, it was totally possible. It would definitely have been harder on lower classes but still not unheard of.
Dangerous-Safe-4336@reddit
As someone who lived through that era: Many men took pride in their ability to "support their family", " and day care was mostly unavailable. So it was not uncommon even for poor families to have a stay at home mom. My family was working class, not exactly poor. My mom drove the same car until it was 12 years old (they'd bought it used).
Our day to day meals were often inexpensive, based on hamburger (mince for UK folk), potatoes or pasta. My dad was a commercial fisherman, but we rarely ate what he caught. A pound of salmon could buy a lot of hamburger. We did eat other fish, like albacore or lingcod occasionally . My mom made most of our clothes, too, and in families where kids were close in age, younger kids were expected to wear their siblings outgrown castoff clothes.
We canned food at home, jam, but also tuna. My parents also quietly helped my grandmother, who was struggling. Even so, they put away a fair amount for their retirement. My mom would have been willing to go to work when the kids were grown, but apparently my dad felt insulted by the idea.
All that said, the commercials were pretty fanciful. No one I knew owned or wore a frilly apron.
Leverkaas2516@reddit
Stay-at-home moms were the norm in America until the mid-70s, among all classes.
And, yes, casseroles and various dishes involving ground beef were very popular. Besides the mass-market cookbooks of the middle of the century, it was also common for product packages to include a recipe for using that product - Campbell's canned, condensed soups were ubiquitous in stores and were often used as a sort of sauce base for one-skillet casseroles.
Such dishes are very easy and cheap to prepare, you basically just dump all the ingredients in a baking pan and put it in the oven.
ahumblerequestplease@reddit
No. They were not. They were the norm for white middle and upper class households after WW2 and before 1970 to not have jobs outside the home.
Before and after that, women had jobs outside the home or took work in their home. The end of the war forced women out of work they had.
Adelaidey@reddit
You're right that more than half of mothers didn't work until the 70s, especially specifically in the unprecedented prosperity following WW2, but even in 1950, 34% of women were in the workforce.
The type of job that a woman was allowed to pursue started really expanding later on, but working-class women have always worked as maids, nannies, seamstresses, receptionists, telephone operators, laundresses, piece workers in factories, governesses, etc, etc, etc. My grandmother was born in 1920 and she was a high school teacher. Her mother was born in 1893 and she made curtains.
ahumblerequestplease@reddit
Basically only white upper and upper middle class people ever had a stay at home mom without a job outside the home in the US and only for a few years. For some reason people believe that is the way it always was for everyone and it wasn't.
budgie02@reddit
Casseroles are still a staple if you ask me, especially in the south and Midwest.
SpeakerCareless@reddit
My grandmother was a housewife in that time and I have her cookbook. Yes it was definitely things like meatloaf and casseroles. It was not considered necessary to slave over elaborate meals as a housewife. It was trendy to use convenience foods and appliances.
sean8877@reddit
My Mother stayed at home and raised the kids into the early '80s. My father was a public school teacher which didn't pay a lot but it was enough to afford a house and we never went hungry. Then when my youngest sister was old enough to go to school my Mother went back to work as a teacher also. So financially things improved with two working parents but they managed to make it work even with only one working. As far as food we had the usual low budget stuff like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Hamburger Helper, Shake & Bake, etc. Once a week she would make tacos which was our favorite.
CarolinCLH@reddit
As someone who actually remembers the '60s, many married mothers stayed home. It was expected. There wasn't much in the way of day care available and a 'good' mother stayed home to raise her children. At least until they were all in school.
But, not everyone was rich. Cheap meals took precedence over quick. It was expected that a woman would spend a good deal of time in the kitchen. Fifteen minute meals weren't much of a thing back then.
NeverRarelySometimes@reddit
What about meatloaf and casserole says 'quick' to you?
Saltpork545@reddit
Yes, particularly for families with 2 working(as in outside of the home) parents, which was still somewhat new in the 1960s.
Hi, I'm a food nerd and this is kind of my lane as I study struggle meals of the 20th century.
It's not always financially motivated and more the amount of mouths to feed, particularly as the nuclear family really set in place in the US. Part of the rise of things like convenience foods and meal-in-a-box eating as well as the casserole was combining the fact that parents had just worked a full day, gotten home and had themselves and children to feed and simply couldn't spend 2-3 hours making dinner from scratch. The families who askewed the nuclear family role and kept the grandparents or had multi-generational households didn't have the same issues.
Food manufacturers caught onto this trend from the 40s and 50s and by the 60s this was starting to become more normalized.
Even among the wealthy this trend in the 60s became less common and the reason why is the political movements of the time. You will always have conservative(not political, social) aspects of a culture who don't follow the new ideas, but the notion that a woman should work and have her own life away from the home became part of the cultural conversation of 1960s American culture.
As for the portrayals themselves, you have to remember that a lot of this is based around advertising, so even for that time it's highly idealized and meant to sell people something that doesn't entirely exist.
In the US for those of us who are old enough, we would call this the 'Leave it to Beaver' myth, this idea that the 1950s were this perfect time to be alive because of a TV show that idealized the 1950s.
Well, the exact same thing happened with the 1960s and advertising and specifically household advertising to women. Magazines for as long as industrialized printing has existed has marketed to women about how to have the 'perfect' home and that includes the work of the kitchen. This trend hasn't stopped either btw, that's what Pinterest is today instead of 'Good housekeeping'.
shelwood46@reddit
I have no idea, my mother always worked (I was born in the 60s), nearly all the women in my family always worked, going back to the 1800s in the US, even after getting married and having kids. I do think those foods were just trendy at the time, much like the common dishes we serve when cooking at home today. Casseroles were something you could make ahead and put in the fridge or freezer then take out and bake closer to dinner time; it was basically what we'd call now "meal prep". I don't think it was necessarily financially motivated. Few people have fancy meals every night.
Listen-to-Mom@reddit
I work and cook almost every night. Meatloaf and casseroles are in the rotation.
ancientastronaut2@reddit
This was my mother when I was growing up (70's). I feel like she had it made compared to my grandmother. She had all the modern conveniences, and cooked these quick and easy type meals when I as growing up. The only time she made something from scratch is on special occasions sometimes and she'd complain about it the whole time.
She had all her housework done by mid morning and would spend the rest of the day shopping, watching soaps, or talking on the phone, then whip up the fastest shake n bake or casserole with campbells soup she could. 💅
Defiant_Network7916@reddit
I'm from a northeast city so no people didn't make that. They made food from their culture. The only exception is my grandmother was given "American classes" through the church and since everyone was Italian-American she thought American food was lasagna, baked ziti, and meatballs lol.
manicpixidreamgirl04@reddit
Plenty of women worked in the 60s. Both of my grandmothers did.
Bootmacher@reddit
My maternal did in the 70's, but my paternal never did. She never even learned to drive, but she was born in 1915.
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
That's so strange to me. Both of my grandmothers, who were born in the 1910s, earned their licenses and drove. One my g-grandmothers (b. 1892) did, too. My father remembers it being a HUGE deal when she and her third husband (she had very bad luck with husbands) built a detached garage in their backyard to house their new car.
Bootmacher@reddit
She was neurotic. I think she was too anxious to drive.
manicpixidreamgirl04@reddit
For some reason, both of my grandmothers could drive, but neither of my grandfathers could.
nakedonmygoat@reddit
Women who stayed at home all day was a middle class thing well into the 1970s. Some women chose to work, but if their husbands didn't have a middle class income, a woman had no choice but to get a job. Needs were fewer then. Smaller houses, maybe only one car for the family, free network TV, and a single land line phone for the whole family. Kids are bored? Give them more chores!
My stepmother didn't work in the '70s, but she made some of our clothes, she washed cloth diapers, and yes, she cooked meatloaf and casseroles, as well as a lot of other things. I can't say why such foods were desirable in the '60s, but the '70s was a time of economic crisis in the US and if a woman didn't work, she was expected to do her part by keeping expenses down.
Also, a lot of the women who were stay at home moms in the '60s and '70s had parents and home economics teachers who had lived through the Great Depression and the food rationing of WWII. Frugal meals were all they had ever known. Their idea of "fancy" was offering a dish of olives and celery sticks to snack on before dinner, and then starting the meal with a salad.
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
I was born in the '60s. My mother worked full-time as an L&D nurse at the same hospital where her MIL worked as the assistant director of personnel. My other grandmother worked as a secretary for a defense contractor. My grandfathers both worked in the automotive industry. One of my grandmothers (the hospital employee) and both of my parents had college degrees. We considered ourselves to be middle verging on upper middle class.
Dinners for us included both homegrown and commercial foods. I grew up in the suburbs with both plenty of room for a large vegetable garden and a large supermarket down the street. Dinners were usually some version of meat, potatoes, and two veg (sometimes from the garden, other times from a can). I remember my mom preparing slow cooker meals frequently, often using the veg my father grew. Soup, usually canned, was more common for lunch than dinner and was often accompanied by a sandwich made with store-bought bread, deli meat, and cheese with home-grown lettuce and tomatoes. (We kids preferred peanut butter & jelly.) Desserts and snacks were often store-bought. Like today, holiday meals with extended family were extravagant, home-cooked multi-course affairs.
Bootmacher@reddit
I can never hear that title without thinking of the Drew Carey Show.
TimeProfessional7120@reddit
Assistant director of personnel of a major public hospital was a pretty impressive position for a woman born in 1914. She retired as in the '70s as director.
AmerikanerinTX@reddit
The #1 thing for understanding American culture imo is that the US has never been homogeneous. Here is how I explain it to Europeans:
Imagine we colonize the moon. The US goes and sets up a colony. Then Russia and China each set up their own. The EU makes a mixed colony but it's mostly Germans and French. India comes later. All the colonies need workers, so they each bring their own version (Americans bring Mexicans, Brits bring Poles, Germans bring Turks, etc.) These colonies are spread across the moon and in the early days, travel isn't so easy, so the early generations stay pretty isolated and similar to their homeland. (This is how the US was until WW1 - much longer than most Europeans realize. This is the first time Americans began to identify as Americans rather than by their country of origin.)
Imagine after a couple hundred years, the colonies begin merging together and creating some sort of unified identity, all while clinging to their heritage and simultaneously bringing in new groups of people, maybe now it's Indonesians, Brazilians, Nigerians, Filipinos, all balancing assimilation with cultural preservation. (This is the last 100 years of America.)
My point is this: when you picture Germany - even though Germany is quite diverse now, there is still a very dominant German culture that everyone is expected to adopt. The US is quite different with a relatively small but dominant cultural group (white Evangelicals) and many, many other cultural pockets that all interconnect. A great example of this is that most Americans know at least some Spanish and are embarrassed of their low Spanish skills. By contrast, almost no schools in Germany offer Turkish, and Germans feel no call to learn it.
So to answer your question more directly, you must keep in mind that anything 'stereotypical/general American' has only ever applied to a quite small portion of the population.
12B88M@reddit
My wife and I both work and we trade weeks for cooking dinner.
Casseroles and such aren't uncommon. We do the prep work the night before and put it in the refrigerator. Then we get home from work the following day, stick it in the oven and dinner is ready in short order.
SteveArnoldHorshak@reddit
That depends. What medium are they cooking in?
AlarmedWillow4515@reddit
What I will say is that in the 60's my father was a lower middle class factory worker, and my mother was a stay at home parent raising five children. She also made dinners like what you describe. They were not wealthy and having her stay at home was partially for cost savings since they had a bunch of kids to raise and she could take care of kids, make cheap meals at home, and mend clothes.
ChessieChesapeake@reddit
Pretty accurate from my perspective. My mom is a baby boomer and comes from a large family. She was one of the oldest and took care of her siblings, so she learned how to cook and sow. When I grew up (70s/80s) she worked and also went to school part time, so casseroles and stuff like that were quick weekday meals she could prep on the weekends.
SukunasStan@reddit
Depends on your region and race. In the 1960s, in my family, my mom's side would cook soul food, fried whiting, fried chicken, fried pork chops, corn, yams, collard greens, chicken noodle soup, and grits. Apparently southern white people cooked the same way. On my dad's side, the housewives cooked things you'd associate with Italian-Americans like pasta, baked ziti, and ham and cabbage soup.
No-Contact6664@reddit
Just look at the Betty Crocker cookbook and you will have 95% of your answers.
Cyber_Punk_87@reddit
My grandmother was a housewife (late 1940s to mid 70s) and they were solidly working class (grandfather was a mechanic). Casseroles and meatloaf and those types of meals were cheap and made the meat/protein stretch further than serving it on its own. A pound of ground beef could easily make 5-6 servings of meatloaf (add potatoes and another veggie on the side), while if you served burgers you'd only get 3-4 servings.
My grandmother wanted to work so they'd have more money, but my grandfather wouldn't let her, even after my mom and uncle were grown and out of the house. When he died in the 70s the first thing she did was go get a job and she worked until retirement at an engineering school. Before they were married she was in the army (women's auxiliary corps) and she had so many fond memories and stories from that time and from when she worked after my grandfather died. Not so many fond memories or stories from the time they were married...
Zappagrrl02@reddit
Food marketing in the 1950s and 1960 prized convenience foods. It’s when we see the introduction of things like boxed baking mixes, jello, and the like
Outrageous-Pin-4664@reddit
In the 60s-70s, my family was working class poor. Dad was a construction worker, and Mom was a housewife raising five kids. She cooked meatloaf, pot roast, fried chicken, pork chops, etc. We ate a lot of beans, potatoes, rice, and pasta.
It typically took her about an hour to cook dinner with all the sides, and everything. If she was cooking chicken, the first thing she had to do was thaw out a whole chicken and cut it up. There was no such thing as buying the chicken in pre-cut parts. Beans were dried, not canned, so that took more prep time. Fries had to be cut up and deep fried. There were no frozen crinkle-cut fries that you could dump in a pan and put in the oven. So some things just took longer.
Being a housewife was more than just cooking dinner though. She was working hard all day long. She made us breakfast in the morning, and washed the breakfast dishes (no dishwasher). She did the laundry, and kept the house spic and span. She would get down on her hands and knees to scrub the tile floors. She made all the beds every single day. She wasn't sitting around watching soaps and eating snacks. She worked her ass off.
And then she cooked dinner, and washed the dishes.
Dave_A480@reddit
Women were in the workforce in small numbers.
Getting fired after you got married because 'you have a new job now' (keeping house) was still the norm.
The real shift to most women working was the 80s/90s.
martlet1@reddit
My mom cooked every meal. We never ate out unless it was a schedule thing where we couldn’t get back home quick enough.
The_Motherlord@reddit
I had 1 neighbor that worked in the 60's and 70's, she was a secretary for a lawyer and worked from 9-3pm, was don't in time to get her kids at school. The rest of the neighborhood women were stay at home moms.
Food quality was horrible in comparison to what you'd find today. There was very little choice in variety of produce in the supermarket. Tomatoes were green or barely pink, never ripe. I don't think I'd ever seen or tasted a ripe tomato until I was in my 20's and I started growing them. There were no fresh herbs, finding fresh garlic was uncommon, if people used garlic it was garlic powder. Most people really didn't know how to cook and expectations were low.
I don't know what program you are referring to but in general the trend of the era in the US was horrible, bland, usually overcooked meals. Canned over boiled vegetables. Iceberg lettuce with under ripe tomatoes and a mayonnaise based dressing. Under seasoned overcooked meat. Green jello with canned fruit. Sometimes green jello with canned fish. Overly soft white bread with bologna. Kraft mac n cheese. Canned spaghetti. Stay home moms were really into talking on the phone and that kept them tied to a wall, they had no time for figuring out how to find or cook decent meals.
SabresBills69@reddit
I was born in the 1960s. most mothers were stsy st home at least until kids were in school all day. my mom started working during the day when the youngest Ed was in 1st grade. the oldest was a teenager. my dad was a high school teacher so we might be home alone 30 min at most before my dad would be home
my parents standard dinner was meat, potatoes/ rice , side veggie, and salad. we would occasionally have some sort of meatloaf or baked casserole. my dad was Italian so we’d also regularly have a pasta/ mestballs type of dish.
back in the 1970s the food was pretty bland. then you started to see regionalizations of food go national like with tacos / Mexican then different asian
Danibear285@reddit
Absolutely
Bluemonogi@reddit
My grandmother worked as a cook at a diner after her kids were grown- prior to that she had been a housewife. My grandparents married in 1934 and lived in a rural area. The family was not wealthy. Stay at home moms were the norm even for lower income families. I’m not sure what she cooked for the family daily but I think they had things like meatloaf.
My mom was a stay at home parent until I started high school. We were not wealthy. My parents got married in 1969 and she had worked before marriage. Growing up we had casseroles and meatloaf dinners often.
KJHagen@reddit
I grew up in a neighborhood where most of the wives stayed at home. Childcare was not as available then and there as now, and most families only had one car.
1235813213455_1@reddit
Even today it's very normal to have a stay at home mom in the upper and lower classes. Almost none of my daughters friends mothers work. Either you make enough and having some run the household and raise the kid is more important than more money or you don't make enough to cover child care so it doesn't make sense to work. I tried to find numbers quickly and sources listed between 50-70% of mothers work in 2025.
DogOrDonut@reddit
A lot of the casserole dishes from that time period were a side effect of WW2. During that time many ingredients were rationed and casseroles were how people learned to make due with what they had. After the war ended they stuck around because people were used to it by that point. It's also why Millenials caused such a culinary revolution in the US when they reached young adulthood. We needed to wait for a generation that was removed from that time period to grow up and go, "why are we eating these?!?!?"
glacialerratical@reddit
The 50s and 60s were weird. This is actually a much more complicated question than you might think.
After WW2, there was a huge shift (during the war, many women worked in support of the war effort) - the short version is that the war ended and everyone wanted to have lots of babies and forget it had happened. Hence, the baby boom.
The war economy moved from munitions to consumer goods (and nuclear weapons), and things like prepared foods and home appliances were seen as space age wonders, not lazy shortcuts.
For many families, women continued to work outside the home - especially poorer families and people of color. But it wasn't until the women's movement of the 70s that middle class white mothers really started working outside the home.
I believe the post war experience in the Slavic region was much different.
LABELyourPHOTOS@reddit
My mom worked. Middle class women could care for the home, working class, in my experience were working.
TeacupCollector2011@reddit
My mom worked part time at a store when we were little in the 60s, but she was home most of the time. Meals were simple but good. Meat, potato, vegetable. The woman made killer pork chops smothered in onion gravy. She went to the grocery store once a week and bought the same items every week. Definitely financially motivated, because we did not have a lot of extras, which was okay because we lived in a neighborhood with lots of families where everyone knew everybody else, so we had our friends and that was enough.
Bastyra2016@reddit
The answer is always “it depends”. GenX (born starting in 1965) is the first generation where it was common for lower middle class to middle class family’s to have two out of the house working adults-hence the introduction of the latch key kid. Single parents and people living below the poverty line most always had a side hustle like taking in washing or mending on top of external paid work.
I think the distinction is back just a few years before the 60s running the household was a full time job. Unless you lived in the city you likely had a garden, a few animals, you manually washed clothes,cooked on a coal or wood stove, you didn’t have a proper fridge so food was sourced differently…An adult usually the female spent a large portion of her day doing what we can do now in a fraction of the time. So they really couldn’t work outside the home. My grandmother (born early 1900s) fit into this category. My mom (born 1938) was a stay at home housewife.
serendipitymoxie@reddit
They were having 3-6+ kids in the 1960s. They kind of had to stay at home and cook non stop to feed them all.
Imaginary_Ladder_917@reddit
Meatloaf is easy to make, although it does need time in the oven. But a stay at home mom in the 60s was likely also cooking more complicated side dishes than I would make if I’m in a hurry. And I have the impression from older relatives that there was always dessert, and not just a bowl of ice cream. That all takes time.
Snarky75@reddit
I make those for my family now. Just last night I made Tater Tot casserole. My daughter loves my meatloaf too. But I am a working mom and I cook. Sometimes you have to do it all.
My grandma was a stay at home mom in the 60s, well kind of - they had a farm so she still did things on the farm. She made 3 meals a day. She taught my mom how to cook and my mom taught me.
GlobalTapeHead@reddit
I grew up in the very late 1960s and 1970’s. All the moms in our neighborhood were stay at home moms. We were middle to upper middle class. Yes it was a thing.
Outlaw_Josie_Snails@reddit
Stay-at-home moms were common in the 1960s. Then during the 1970s and 1980s, women started to enter the workforce. "Dual-income families."
"TV dinners," "meatloaf," "casseroles," "Crock-Pot meals," etc., were fairly common.
Appropriate-Win3525@reddit
I'm on the younger side of GenX, in my late 40s. My mom was a SAHM in the 80s. Both my parents were born during WW2. We were not wealthy, but my dad did make good a good living as a steel worker. She did work a number of side gigs as a photographer and also volunteered. When I was a teen, she started working for her best friend.
She always made dinner every day. Usually it was a protein, starch, and vegetable. Rarely was it convenience food unless it was Rice-a-Roni or Kraft Mac and Cheese. I think I've only had Hamburger Helper twice in my life, both times as an adult. Casseroles were only an occasional thing. We would keep instant mashed potatoes in the house, but only because she had a recipe to use the flakes as coating for oven-fried chicken. Most of the food was from scratch because it was too expensive to feed a family of five on convenience foods.
We also sat down as a family every night. If my dad worked an occassional evening shift, then she made dinner earlier, he ate, and then we kids ate with my mom after school at regular dinner time.
If she did cook something "quick" it was usually on the weekends because we were going somewhere or had a baseball game to go to.
When I was in college, my mom got sick and my dad retired. The roles reversed. He took over all of the cooking.
smappyfunball@reddit
My mom was a stay at home wife from the early 60s till my parents split up in 77 and divorced in 78. I was a baby and a toddler in the 60s but what my mom cooked didn’t vary too much between the 60s and 70s.
She wasn’t into casseroles but meat loaf was popular, and chicken, lasagna, mostly things that weren’t too complicated.
And generally healthy, we always had a vegetable side.
We lived on the west coast, and still do, so that probably factors in to what we ate.
Fire_Mission@reddit
I wasn't around in the 1960s. Can't say.
Butimthedudeman@reddit
I stayed home with my 3 boys for 10 years. Definitely wasn't because we were wealthy. It was because at that time that was the option we had. Childcare costs are wild. But yeah I had way more of a daily routine weekly routine type structure when I stayed home. Usually cooked on week nights. Once in a while we'd eat out somewhere for a cheap date night. After they were all school aged and I was subbing part time at their school, meals and home structure definitely changed. More hectic.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
This actually makes so much more sense even today, I'm looking at it from a privileged viewpoint eventhough my family was very poor, women even in the 60s had at minimum around 6 months of paid maternity leave, and then you had acces to public (free) daycare until the child turend 3, or most commonly you would live in home with grandparents or even older generations who would care for the baby whilst the mother worked, I completely forgot that the US doesn't work like that, even today when our daycares are fully private, women get 3 years of paid maternity leave, there are issues with the system, but I genuinely forgot that women in the US don't have access to that.
Butimthedudeman@reddit
What you described sounds like a literal dream world.
AmIAMom@reddit (OP)
tbf it is definitely better than what you are desribing, but it does have massive problems, so with the insane living costs and them still rising it makes women tied to their partners even in abusive situations for much longer, because you cannot support yourself let alone both you and a baby on state support alone, and daycares are fully private and very expensive, because they made maternity leave longer, so going back to work is also not an option to many, because most jobs won't take you in the first 3 years, and that's also ignoring the social and cultural judgment of being a bad mom, because you went back to work and it also makes work discrimination worse in many cases, because they are legaly required to hold your job, until you return, so if you're a young women it can be extremely hard to get a job, because it's assumed that eventually you'll get pregnant and just leave for a few years. Again still a better system than what you guys have.
Butimthedudeman@reddit
Yeah it sucks ass here. 😒 with my first i was working at a bank and only got 3 weeks at full pay and 3 more at half pay using PTO and short term disability. 21 and married but going back to work after 6 weeks postpartum is not beneficial for anyone involved.
Maleficent_Ability84@reddit
Not many people here were alive in the 60's
Kingsolomanhere@reddit
I bought my first 22 caliber rifle in 1966 at age 10. Almost every mom I knew back then was a stay at home mom. One grandma took care of the farm during the day while grandpa worked, the other was the business/office manager for 2 local newspapers after her kids grew up and left home
kitchengardengal@reddit
Some of us were.
feliciams@reddit
I was alive in the 60’s😊
No-Equivalent2621@reddit
This subreddit steers older than most subreddit
bleeding_eyes@reddit
Don’t forget there was a lot of stigma against women having most jobs. Poor women and poor immigrant women often worked in factories or as domestic helpers/cleaners. During world war 2 woman were relied upon to work even more jobs. A huge expansion into more diverse factory work, industrial work/building weapons. Women took support jobs in the military, expanding the role of administrative jobs, mechanics, radio jobs. Women became telephone operators, typists, and computers (Google it!). There were niche things that opened up out of necessity like support Air Force pilots, women’s baseball! This was when women expanded dramatically into healthcare everything from nursing to ambulance drivers.
After the war a lot of women returned to home. But when birth control was developed and started getting to the public in the 60s and 70s this coincided with the “second wave feminism”. I think this period is usually considered 1960-80s. The pill let women put off having babies, giving single and married women the opportunity to go to college and work outside the home without worrying about childcare.
Today most families need two incomes, however soaring childcare costs have forced some parents (mothers or fathers) to trade careers for stay at home roles. If you can’t afford daycare it may be a better financial hit to quit work at least until kids can go to school all day.
sgtm7@reddit
My mom was a SAHM, and I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s. Most of our neighbors had SAHMs also. We were far from rich.
PurpleToe6241@reddit
for sure, those meals were super common back then. Meatloaf and casseroles were like the go-to easy dinners for busy families, and yeah, it was definitely about saving time and money.
hr11756245@reddit
I'm going to guess this sort of thing varied a lot, but from what I can tell, my parents were raised on a diet of meat, potatoes, and a vegetable.
My maternal grandfather was a cool in the CC camps during the great depression. A typical meal when I visited him in the 80s and 90s would be a pot roast, mashed potatoes, green beans, apple sauce, cottage cheese, sliced tomatoes, bread, and butter. Sometimes, he would make a custard pie for desert. Leftovers were eaten at the next lunch or dinner meal. He also made the best pancakes.
My grandmother did most of the cooking before she got sick. I am making the assumption from what other family members have told me that was pretty typical of the food they ate back in the day.
It was definitely not common for a husband to cook in the 50s. My grandfather was very much the exception.
Icy-Gene7565@reddit
Yes, there was a time before Uber eats when dinner was prepared from ingredients following a recipe.
Radiant_Bluebird4620@reddit
Also very few people on earth of any income level eat elaborate formal or even simple expensive meals all the time. My mom didn't work full time, and she is a good cook. We were definitely financially comfortable, but not completely without a budget. Some of my childhood favorites were definitely less expensive and easily prepared
Sadimal@reddit
Stay at home moms were a common thing back then. They would have a ton of quick recipes that they could whip up.
The thing is, kitchens up until the 1960s were designed to be more efficient. Cabinet systems meant you could have everything you needed right there instead of having to move all around the kitchen.
Moms that stayed at home were still out and about being involved in the community. They didn't just stay at home and take care of the house all day.
Ill-Relationship-890@reddit
Many moms didn’t work outside the home in the 60s. Meatloaf and casseroles were absolutely what was served at my house.
she_makes_a_mess@reddit
Most of those house wives are probably dead by now. The kids raised that way are boomers
Affectionate-Tank-39@reddit
Some of the older gen x also.
Affectionate-Tank-39@reddit
It wasn't until the 70s and 80s that day at home parents became less common and by the 90s most worked.
Additional_Low8050@reddit
In the 60s most Moms were home. In my neighborhood all moms were. I didn’t know there was a lower class.
Annjenette@reddit
I would say yes, it was a thing, rich or poor. Grocery stores like Publix often gave out recipe cards and recipes were often printed in newspapers, magazines, and on the boxes of ingredients. It was just a fun thing to do, learning new recipes. My grandmother was mostly a housewife. She did work here and there when the kids were old enough to watch themselves. More out of boredom than necessity.
Altaira99@reddit
I think in lower income families the wife usually worked outside the home as well as covering her household duties, but I'd like to see supporting data.
ShipComprehensive543@reddit
I would say it was fairly common for women in the 60's from all economic families to have a SAH wife, who would cook meals, although, those would vary widely - my mom was a SAH wife who cooked us dinner but never made casseroles. This all changed early 70's when more women started working outside of the home, at least that was my experience. But like most questions here, it depends on a lot of things, geographical area and culture, income, etc.