Was all the children playing ''house''. Was that really how it was back then? 23 year olds acting like they're in their 40's with huge amount of ''clout'' in their communities bossing middle aged black women around. What a joke. 23 year olds today work in coffee shows or are still n school, some work an entry level job but they get treated like dogs.
share I don't find it one bit funny, but that's the difference in the times we lived in then and the times we live in now.
I would go so far to say that there are married 23 year old women in this day and age who employ help in their homes. One does have clout in one's own home just as one has clout in the business world. I have had bosses and supervisors who were much younger than me. Regardless of age, we treated each other with respect.
Wages were high then, at least for white men, and the cost of living was low.
That meant an ordinary young white man could earn enough to support a housewife and kids, AND hire a full-time servant for his equally young wife. Because wages were so much higher for white men than black women, that a man could give a fraction of his income to his wife for "household money", and the maid would be paid whatever the wife didn't spend on groceries and diapers. So the maid would be getting a fraction of a fraction of a white man's income. That is just how it was, nobody thought a black woman's labor was worth more than a bit of pocket change.
I have no idea how minimum wage laws played into this, I suspect the "help" ladies were paid far less than federal minimum wage.
I really didn't think of the movie as 'funny' then again I watched it from the perspective of yes a woman w multiple disabilities whose own employment is also limited even w a college degree.
Completing college merely opened my eyes to how things were. Doesn't mean it's 'right' or that your family etc was above acting a certain way.
The only ones with living wages in that era are the white men. The white women will be forced to resign when they are pregnant--pregnancy non-discrimination laws did not exist until the 1970's.
Sex discrimination in employment has just been enacted (it is 1964) but this will be (especially back then) treated as a joke meant to siderail the civil rights act....rather than anything serious. So a working white woman who does not 'need to' is considered oddity.