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Post by LoopyLobes on Jul 4, 2016 21:36:22 GMT
I'm going to watch it properly after the news as I was on the phone for most of it.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 5, 2016 18:59:26 GMT
I enjoyed it.I wonder what Penelope Wilton has done to her face? She looks a bit different in this from when she was in Downton. It's funny to see how far we have come in society with our attitudes about women and sex. It is set in the 80s - not so long ago.
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Post by LoopyLobes on Jul 5, 2016 19:18:30 GMT
See, I remember the 80s very well, being in my teens and early 20s then, and I remember it all quite differently - we (my friends and I) were a lot more clued up and open minded about marital aids than the women seemed to be last night.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 8, 2016 8:45:44 GMT
I was in my 20s in the 1980s and I was not clued up on marital AIDS etc. They were seen as something that nice girls/women didn't use & shops which sold them were frequented by the dirty Mac brigade, and is not something that I would have ever discussed with my boyfriends/husband or ever dreamed of actually buying. I suppose it is a bit to do with how you have been bought up. My parents were of the pre war generation who were somewhat prudish and that has rubbed off on me. I don't have a problem with anyone enjoying the "aids" but don't want to use them myself.
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Post by LoopyLobes on Jul 8, 2016 15:34:00 GMT
Same here to a certain extent, but I definitely was clued up about them. Didn't want or feel the need for them myself, but I knew all about them as did all my friends and we did talk and laugh about such things.
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Post by marion on Jul 9, 2016 17:36:19 GMT
Same here, LL. I remember there being various shops selling such items around Soho, but was not aware of these parties. However I found the whole thing rather old-fashioned for the 80s. Women being told they could never get a job as they hadn't got any skills etc. By that time the Equal Pay Act had been passed, and they got the same education as everyone else FGS. I was working in a City bank and treated as a full and equal member of the team, not a token woman. So that part of it seemed more like the early 60s to me. I have decided to abandon ship as it just isn't my cup of tea.
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Post by LoopyLobes on Jul 9, 2016 21:06:06 GMT
I agree with that. I started work in the 1980s and even before that at school I felt that I was as well prepared as any chap to go in whichever direction I chose career-wise. Possibly down to my school more than anything, but I definitely felt equal to any man.
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Post by technicolour on Jul 9, 2016 22:25:11 GMT
Yes, more like the seventies wasn't it. But supposedly this is based on genuine recollections?
Love Penelope Wilton's Indian accent when she says 'Oh, my goodness.' Not sure yet what significance this will have to the plot.
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Post by hoodylover on Jul 9, 2016 22:49:14 GMT
I think it depends on what part of the country you come from. I'm from the north of England and I was a young wife in 1982, when Brief Encounters is set. I remember very sexist treatment at work.I also remember men treating their wives in the way that's depicted in the programme.
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Post by Miranda on Jul 9, 2016 23:20:40 GMT
I think it also depends on the age of the women. There were a lot of changes in the 70s with Women's Liberation and stuff but it took time for it to filter through society. It probably wasn't until the end of the Eighties that it became expected that women would do what they wanted to do, the way it is now. Mostly.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2016 5:46:38 GMT
Same here, LL. I remember there being various shops selling such items around Soho, but was not aware of these parties. However I found the whole thing rather old-fashioned for the 80s. Women being told they could never get a job as they hadn't got any skills etc. By that time the Equal Pay Act had been passed, and they got the same education as everyone else FGS. I was working in a City bank and treated as a full and equal member of the team, not a token woman. So that part of it seemed more like the early 60s to me. I have decided to abandon ship as it just isn't my cup of tea. The City may have been enlightened during the 1980s but sadly it wasn't neccessarily the case elsewhere. It was circa 1988 when I and another female colleague applied for a sales job within the company we were working for. The sales manager called us in to tell us we would not be interviewed as he didn't believe that women should go to customer's homes (as was required by the particular job) or to businesses to do the same. In fact, he thought that married women should really stay at home as housewives like his wife - he wouldn't "let" his wife work. As late as 1999 I had an argument with a temporary colleague (different company) who was telling us how men earned more than women doing exactly the same job. I said this was not legal and she replies that of course they earned more - they were men (it is worth mentioning that this woman was younger than me)
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Post by marion on Jul 10, 2016 8:53:38 GMT
I did wonder after I wrote that if I had been in a bit of a London bubble. So I am shocked to hear your story, as I am by any unequal treatment of women. The younger colleague in 1999...... my heart sinks!
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Post by Miranda on Jul 10, 2016 10:11:15 GMT
Yeah.... I think she was a bit of an oddity by that time. I would certainly have curled my lip and told her to sort her head out. I'm not saying that unequal pay didn't happen because some bosses will try anything to save money. But it had been illegal for a long time by then and she must have been living under a rock to have missed 30 years of campaigning!
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2016 11:05:15 GMT
It was not until 1973, less than 10 years before the programme is set, that the Foreign Office lifted its marriage bar for female diplomats. this kind of attitude would have been very fresh in the minds of the women in Brief Encountrs and is played out in the attitudes of some of the men in particular. If women had been so recently overcome such difficulties in persuing a career no wonder they were reticent to take a lead in matters of sex.
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Post by marion on Jul 10, 2016 12:25:07 GMT
I can remember working next to a woman when we benefitted from the new rules on equal pay. She told me she was against it. I picked out the most hopeless chap in the office and said well if you don't think you are as good as X, fair enough, but I think my work is every bit as good as his. She was furious as she was intensely proud of her quality of work and told me I was missing the point!!! He was a MAN. At the time staff perks were not given out equally either, so a married woman could not have a staff mortgage and single women had to be interviewed first, which I think was to check they would never get a proposal or were menopausal so would never leave to have children.
Once the equality rules came in though, I found that in The City institutions got with the programme very quickly. Of course they have large HR functions so can enforce the rules. That didn't mean you could always avoid chauvinism in the daily,office politics of course.
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