My grandmother raised my dad and his brother in the 1950 and 1960s.
She wasn’t educated and couldn’t drive. At that time women had few rights. She couldn’t get a bank loan, a credit card, or a mortgage without a male co-signer.
My grandfather, her husband, was not a kind man. He was abusive, a drunk, and a womanizer. She didn’t have many options but to stay.
This is a time period that many currently are idolizing. They’re seeing it as this bright pristine time when things were simpler, easier, less complicated.
Happy.
They sure made it look that way in the sitcoms of the era.
The heteronormative couple, a dad who works, a mom who stays home in her dress and pearls and cares for her 2.5 children.
She is a happy homemaker who has dinner and a smile waiting when her husband returns home.
This is the myth being sold today; that women are burdened by their rights and by working outside the home.
The longest conversation I had with my beautiful soft-spoken grandmother was when she told me, at any cost, go to school. Educate yourself. Always be able to take care of yourself so that you are never trapped.
Her advice echoes across generations, passed from countless mothers to daughters.
Being a homemaker isn’t a trap when it’s freely chosen. But when women are denied education, financial independence, or legal rights, it can become a prison.
One where leaving an abusive partner isn’t an option. That’s the danger behind the glossy image being pushed today. It sells nostalgia for a past that was far less free than it looks on Instagram.
The same rhetoric that told my grandmother her place was in the home is resurfacing now in efforts to restrict abortion, birth control, and even no-fault divorce. It’s the same captivity in prettier packaging.
And young women are gladly handing away the rights their grandmothers never had but fought to give.
My grandmother knew from experience that dependence without options isn’t safety, it’s captivity.
And yet, here we are, watching that captivity being dressed up as empowerment, as feminism is being denounced and turned into an ugly word.
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