She was hopped up on black beauties, but she always had dinner on the table at six!

Via Pandagon, women who do want to go back to the fifties:

Neither of us drinks and our social life revolves around visiting like-minded friends for tea and cakes.

To which Amanda Marcotte says, "Gosh, do you think people didn’t drink in the 50s?"

The biggest problem with trying to catch the past in amber is that you get it wrong, and all honor and praise to Ms. Marcotte for calling them on it. (I wonder whether she would be okay with fifties nostalgia if it looked more like Mad Men.) That being said, I'm surprised that she failed to make an obvious leap. If the real fifties were a lot wetter than the fifties of myth, then isn't it possible that it was also a lot less restrictive for women?

The public picture of fifties wholesomeness looked like a sitcom, but everybody had a handle in his top drawer (or stashed in her kitchen cabinet). In the same way, the perfect fifties woman was a Betty Draper housewife, but, when it came down to it, they could accommodate driven career women like Joan Holloway and Peggy Olson (or, for that matter, Mary McCarthy and Phyllis Schlafly). Feminists are quick to say that the romanticized housewife is a myth, and it was, but they should realize the ways this revelation undercuts their arguments as well as my side's.