Benita Eisler found that the ethos of the 1950s and 1960s prized “doing it yourself” when it came to child rearing, without the expectation of the intergenerational and paid help common in families just a few decades before. It was perhaps a precursor of the increasing individualism that would come later, but with the Silent twist that it was individualism of a nuclear family. “Never before had hundreds of thousands of college-educated women, wives of the professional middle classes, refused to share even the most menial duties of childcare with paid help,” she writes.
