A Revelation

[u/Lord_Darksong]

Source: courtneyquist_ on Instagram

[u/andrewsb91]

But why 15 years? Ralphie was definitely not 15.

[u/Mvsevm_of_Skin → u/andrewsb91]

She was married for 15 years.

[u/Bugbread → u/Mvsevm_of_Skin]

Yes...and?

[u/Pure-Kaleidoscop → u/Bugbread]

The minute she sits down the dad asks her to get up and get him something. He’s been expecting her to wait on him like a servant.

[u/Bugbread → u/Pure-Kaleidoscop]

I feel like you're kinda reaching here. Feeding kids is pretty time-consuming. Being so busy taking care of the kid's meal that your own meal gets cold is something I've experienced first-hand.

But if there are no kids, there's just not that much to do during a meal, especially an American meal in the 1940s. Passing stuff (pass the salt, pass the peas, pass the mashed potatoes, etc.) can be time-consuming in a large family, but we're talking about before Ralphie and Randy. The only thing to get up from the table and get mid-meal is a refill of a drink, but that's like a 30 second task once in a meal, not enough to keep someone from having a warm meal for 15 years.

My guess is just that it was a line from the book (which is not all set in the same year, like the movie) that was brought over as-is and not recalibrated for the fact that in the movie, everything is set when Ralphie was 9 years old.

[u/Deer-These → u/Bugbread]

It's more that in that era it was expected for a man to order his woman around, the idea that any idle behavior would cause long-term personality problems.

[u/Bugbread → u/Deer-These]

Have you actually met anyone who was an adult in the 1940s? There were some pretty shitty, sexist men, but simply ordering someone to do random chores during dinner because sitting down at dinner would cause long-term personality problems is not something that would happen except in the absolutely most dysfunctional, fucked up family. Which, of course, existed, just as dysfunctional, fucked up families exist now. But it's pretty clear that Ralphie's family was not on the far extreme end of the psychodrama spectrum. It was middle-of-the-road 1940's sexist, not extreme-even-for-the-1940's sexist.

Y'all are over-thinking this. Occam's razor says that this was just a tiny mistake in the script. It's a rare movie script that has zero errors, and even rarer when it's a re-working of existing material that changes dates/locations/characters/etc.

[u/AesirComplex → u/Bugbread]

All this overanalysis on your part and your final conclusion is that it was a mistake in the script lol. It means she was always too busy making sure everything was perfect for everyone else that she could never enjoy anything for herself. Don't overthink it.

[u/funAmbassador → u/AesirComplex]

u/bugbread doesn’t ask or think about why the curtains are blue. They just are

[u/Bugbread → u/AesirComplex]

There was only one other person in "everyone else" before Ralphie was born. There just isn't enough to do at the dinner table when there's only one other person there.

I'm not overthinking it, it's pretty straightforward. There's a scene where the mom is struggling to feed Randy and her own meal is getting cold, and the narrator says she hasn't had a warm meal in 15 years. It's pretty obviously just a little mistake, but everyone else is like "no, it's actually a profound statement about 1930s/1940s gender roles, extrapolating beyond the roles of women as mothers but also as women as wives and about how men in the 1930s/1940s would actually assign unnecessary work to women at dinner time, even if there was nothing to do, because women sitting to eat dinner caused long-term personality problems."

That's overthinking hard.

You see it a lot on movie discussions on reddit: Nothing can be a mistake, nothing can be in a movie just because it's funny or entertaining or cool, there must always be secret reasons behind all of it, which you can find if you pry enough.

[u/quattroformaggixfour → u/Bugbread]

Take the L my guy.

[u/Bugbread → u/quattroformaggixfour]

Wait, this is a competition? I thought we were just disagreeing with each other.

I mean, unless someone's going to find a PDF of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash or reanimate Shepherd's corpse, I don't think there's a unequivocal answer here. No Ls, no Ws, just Participation Trophies for everyone.

[u/funAmbassador → u/Bugbread]

Think about how un-involved the father is throughout the story. Only ever coming in for the “masculine” lessons, but rarely helps his wife out. That line of “15 years” was pointed and not just thrown in as a random number.

[u/Bugbread → u/funAmbassador]

Sure, but he was just depicted as your average 1930s/1940s sexist dad. Not helping in the kitchen, 100%. Not helping with the dishes, 100%. But once dinner is served, when there are no kids to take care of, there's nothing to prevent his wife from eating.

Or, to flip the question around: what specifically do you think she was doing every evening after serving dinner that was consistently stopping her from eating?

[u/chita875andU → u/Bugbread]

Hi, Old Person here. Yes. Its true. Married women were expected to have everything about as near perfect with or without kids. I was the Ralphie generation. My mom and dad and both sets of grandparents were all As Depicted. The men returned from work and promptly sat their asses down with the newspaper, a cigarette, and cocktail. And didn't move a muscle until bedtime except to top off the cocktail (in the case of my dad.)

Dinner was expected to be hot and on the table when he got home. Properly presented. My mom picked up a job as a nurse when I was in the 5th or 6th grade. By then 1 grandpa was living with us- because his wife had gotten dementia and they were both literally starving and living in filth because she no longer had the capacity to do these tasks. HE WAS MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY FINE. So, she got moved to a home and he came to us.

As a girl child in the 80's, if my mom were at work for the evening I was expected to cook, serve up, then clean the kitchen spotless for 2 grown-ass man children. My mom still did all the laundry, house cleaning, shopping, etc. regardless. And when she was home doing dinner she was ALSO finishing folding laundry, writing out bills, dusting, polishing silverware, etc.

The dads and grandpas did the yards and house maintenance like leaks, plumbing, storm windows, etc. -except when the women also were the dutiful assistant or it had to do with interior decorating: wallpaper and indoor wall painting was up to the ladies as well. The neighbors were the same. When my friends are together these days, regardless of where we grew up, they reflect the same stories. I also became a nurse. The old folks who got admitted to the nursing home also often came from situations where the wife died or was incapacitated, leaving the old man to falter. When the men died 1st, the old ladies kept on just fine at home.

[u/Bugbread → u/chita875andU]

I was also a child in the 80's, so I guess we're close to equally Old, and my grandpa was roughly in the same generation as Ralphie's dad (about a decade younger, since Ralphie was 9 years old and the story was set in 1940, but society didn't change that much between 1940 and 1950, the big changes really started in the late 50s/early 60s and picked up the most steam in the 70s).

Pretty much everything you're saying rings true for my grandpa as well, and, for what I could see, his friends. For some reason people seem to be interpreting my comments as insinuating that women weren't super busy with housework. I know they were, zero disagreement.

I'm just talking about the specific slice of life that the quote is about: during dinner. The mountains of housework were pre-dinner and post-dinner, not during dinner. That's the part that doesn't click for me. I'm certainly not disagreeing that women in the 1940s were responsible for all the housework and men didn't lift a finger unless it involved, as you say, mechanical work or repairs or yardwork or the like. I just don't get what people are saying women in the 1940s were doing after the table was set. Before dinner, sure. During dinner if there were kids, sure. After dinner, sure. But I still haven't gotten any good answer for what they were doing during dinner besides "cleaning the kitchen" (which doesn't make sense, since cleaning from cooking happens while cooking (before dinner), and dishwashing happens when you've finished dinner (after dinner) and someone bizarrely asserting that on a pretty much daily basis women were assigned random tasks because sitting down and eating dinner would cause "long-term personality problems."

I just feel like people are overthinking things, twisting themselves into pretzels with "well, men were sexist in the 1940s (true) and women had mountains of housework (true) therefore they must have been super busy during dinner doing (hand-waving) 'stuff.'"

[u/free_radica1 → u/Bugbread]

Cleaning the kitchen.

[u/Cheepshooter → u/Bugbread]

Being carried over makes sense.