I view the 1930s the same as I view being a woman now. Major censorship because they don’t want you to influence women to be anything other than what they want.
I view it as, a lovely aesthetic to dress up as for a costume, had some cool things for the fact that women made huge strides for the work force (before the men came back from the war) and then back to restrictions that suffocate.
Well I didn’t live through it so I can’t say firsthand what it was like.
We also have to ask the question “what is a 1930s woman?” because the answer is going to look different between women of affluence and women of poverty. Women of colour and white women. Straight vs queer women. The disabled vs the abled. Even the country and the politics of the individual country.
Example, the women on one side of my family were Anglo-Indians born into the British Raj. Their position as mixed-race women of a white colonial class, was *different* to that of the desi women who existed as Indians underneath the Raj.
But when the Anglo-Indian diaspora came, in the Independence War, the community found itself erased from India but *also* from white Eurocentric society. They faced racism and identity issues in Australia, UK, Canada etc, and thus their whole social structure as women was different from what they knew growing up in India. Their 1930s experience, wildly different to their 1950s-1960s experience.
My great grandmother was a tween to young adult through the 1930s, but she was an Anglo Indian woman in Kolkata. Her experiences are going to be wildly different to a white woman growing up in middle class 1930s Australia.
I think thus my answer is, “my view is entirely nuanced because there’s far too many factors to make a blanket statement for all women in the 1930s”
I feel like it was a time of extremes depending on your social class, income, and how progressive your family was.
The Great Depression was a time of change for women. Women could vote, women were entering colleges more and more. Doors were really opening and some families were cheering their daughters and wives on seeing their success as success for everyone. Other families were clinging hard to men being in charge, women being silent.
I feel like it was a time that how your parents felt and how your immediate community reacted had deep impact because it wasn’t easy or simple to just pack up and move to somewhere else. I feel like a lot of people of both sexes got trapped in lives they didn’t really want because of the economy too.
This question doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s safe to assume that most women on the internet in 2025 probably weren’t also women in the 1930s. Are you clumsily asking us to compare women’s rights in 2025 to those in the 1930s?
I’m in the United States. Racist old white men with more money than brains or heart are racing to see who can be the first to drag us all back to the 1800s, but I’m still way happier and freer in this time period than I think I would be in the 30s.
The world is not set up to give a shit about women. The world has never been kind to women in any way that matters. I don’t know how we can make the changes that we so desperately need to make without…doing things that, were I to describe them, would break many of Reddit’s sitewide rules.
But you could not pay me enough to willingly go be a woman in the 30s. Nope.
Well, I am Black and a woman so my view is fairly negative. It was a time where we had little rights, access to opportunity, and lynchings were very much still acceptable. It’s a time period I never ever want to live in and I admire my grandparents for making a life out of the discrimination and injustice they dealt with.
Comments
[removed]
I view the 1930s the same as I view being a woman now. Major censorship because they don’t want you to influence women to be anything other than what they want.
I view it as, a lovely aesthetic to dress up as for a costume, had some cool things for the fact that women made huge strides for the work force (before the men came back from the war) and then back to restrictions that suffocate.
Well I didn’t live through it so I can’t say firsthand what it was like.
We also have to ask the question “what is a 1930s woman?” because the answer is going to look different between women of affluence and women of poverty. Women of colour and white women. Straight vs queer women. The disabled vs the abled. Even the country and the politics of the individual country.
Example, the women on one side of my family were Anglo-Indians born into the British Raj. Their position as mixed-race women of a white colonial class, was *different* to that of the desi women who existed as Indians underneath the Raj.
But when the Anglo-Indian diaspora came, in the Independence War, the community found itself erased from India but *also* from white Eurocentric society. They faced racism and identity issues in Australia, UK, Canada etc, and thus their whole social structure as women was different from what they knew growing up in India. Their 1930s experience, wildly different to their 1950s-1960s experience.
My great grandmother was a tween to young adult through the 1930s, but she was an Anglo Indian woman in Kolkata. Her experiences are going to be wildly different to a white woman growing up in middle class 1930s Australia.
I think thus my answer is, “my view is entirely nuanced because there’s far too many factors to make a blanket statement for all women in the 1930s”
[removed]
I feel like it was a time of extremes depending on your social class, income, and how progressive your family was.
The Great Depression was a time of change for women. Women could vote, women were entering colleges more and more. Doors were really opening and some families were cheering their daughters and wives on seeing their success as success for everyone. Other families were clinging hard to men being in charge, women being silent.
I feel like it was a time that how your parents felt and how your immediate community reacted had deep impact because it wasn’t easy or simple to just pack up and move to somewhere else. I feel like a lot of people of both sexes got trapped in lives they didn’t really want because of the economy too.
I’m originally from Guam. Not really where you wanted to be right before WWII.
This question doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s safe to assume that most women on the internet in 2025 probably weren’t also women in the 1930s. Are you clumsily asking us to compare women’s rights in 2025 to those in the 1930s?
I’m in the United States. Racist old white men with more money than brains or heart are racing to see who can be the first to drag us all back to the 1800s, but I’m still way happier and freer in this time period than I think I would be in the 30s.
The world is not set up to give a shit about women. The world has never been kind to women in any way that matters. I don’t know how we can make the changes that we so desperately need to make without…doing things that, were I to describe them, would break many of Reddit’s sitewide rules.
But you could not pay me enough to willingly go be a woman in the 30s. Nope.
Well, I am Black and a woman so my view is fairly negative. It was a time where we had little rights, access to opportunity, and lynchings were very much still acceptable. It’s a time period I never ever want to live in and I admire my grandparents for making a life out of the discrimination and injustice they dealt with.