Reflections on Yesteryear

 Fiorella's mother was of the stay-at-home variety. She'd taught high school, but resigned of course, when she became pregnant, which was the rule back then.  Men and women had different roles. Men strode into the world and made the money necessary to support the family and played golf on the side, while women stayed home and took care of the house and the children. Mother's only social outlet was Sunday at church.
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Mother had The Eye. She knew how to make things look nice, and she knew what everyone else should do to make things look nice too.
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One day when Fiorella was in her first semester of college one hundred miles from home, her father called and said her mother was crying because she hadn't heard from Fio for a while. Yours Truly  immediately rectified the situation and, from then on, called her mother once a week, usually on a Wednesday, but moving her calls up to every day when Mother was dying.
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Fio is proud to tell you that she and Husband bought her mother a mink jacket two years before her death. Mom got a kick our of catching women at church glancing at her and turning to alert their friends to her luxury.
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Women were still second-class citizens when Fio was a young'n, but they made a dramatic acceleration in worth during the 1980's Reagan recession. Fiorella's father was already retired, but younger men were suddenly laid off,  and the only way families could make it was for the wife to find a low-paying job to tide the family over. After a while,  the economy got better, but by then women had become accustomed to working outside the home.
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Excepting seven years while her children were young, Fiorella took home a paycheck herself, sometimes from two or three jobs at the same time, until she retired.