What are the similarities with the 50s?

Yes, it wouldn't expect one-two- three, but the 50s have a lot of similarities to the years we are now living in. Sometimes you don't even need to replace the words, think of housing shortage, and we're back in the 50's.

Housing shortage; Living in with your parents
Living with your parents, but also with strangers, became very common for adults. “My parents were still living with my grandparents at the time. They were sitting in an attic room with three children. That was quite normal then. Only later did they get their own rental property.'Although the Netherlands was constantly building, it was never enough. Often, it was about cheap unit homes that could be put up at a rapid pace. In 1956, the first 200 people settled in the Flevopolders. The fifties taught the Netherlands to build quickly.

Women's Rights: No Need for Husband
A wedding ring on the finger was no longer automatically the end of a career. If you look at the lives of women in the 1950s through modern glasses, it's clear that they were worse off then than they are now. In the vast majority of families, the post-war role pattern was the same as before: men worked, women took care of the children and the household.

But in the fifties there were also cracks in the rusted division of roles. In 1956, the Act of Disability was abolished. So women were allowed more. Yet that didn't mean that they immediately threw themselves into their new freedoms en masse. Married women entered the labour market reluctantly: usually part-time and usually not in overly high-flying jobs.

The term ' glass ceiling' refers to the fact that women can climb into the hierarchy of the enterprise, but only to a certain level. ... The 'sticking floor': There is an invisible barrier that prevents women from promoting and getting stuck at their original level. We have an old boys network in the Netherlands: older men with cigars and whiskey who hold and occupy top positions.