It also strikes me as an unfortunate happenstance and not a conscious and intentional plot to deny women career advancement.
It was the height of the housewife era. Women were actively discouraged from working and there was a massive amount of clear and outright sexism towards those who chose to have a career. It seems much more likely to me that they didn't consider her an equal part of the team and that's why she was left out of the story.
The height of the housewife era was funded in part by the high savings rates during WW2 when many married couples were de facto DINKs -- dual income, no kids -- because she was Rosie the Riveter, he was serving in the military overseas and, as Lucille Ball once said, you can't exactly get pregnant by phoning it in.
Furthermore, most scenarios contain myriad factors and I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.
Sure, but it didn't help that women were encouraged (or forced) to leave their jobs so that the returning men could have them. It's not coincidental that "Kelly Girl Services" and the general temp agency (which has been so much bad for both women and men in terms of wages, job security, and promotion opportunities) took off in this era. Or Freidan's best-seller status in 1963.
> I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.
Blame helps in figuring out what to address. At the very least a sense of past injustice motivates people in the present to address present wrongs.
It's important to cast blame for the actions and attitudes of people, because the basic motivations behind those actions and attitudes don't change, they're effectively eternal with the human race. The light needs to constantly be shined on them, or you get women like Eileen Bailey and Ann Coles[1], or men like Eddie Slovik[2]. The shining of the light is the path forward, or at least a part of it. Does it matter whether COVID came from a Chinese lab or a wet market, now? No. But the shining of the light on the bad practices at both places is the most likely way to see that both sets of practices are corrected. (I do think it was stupid to cast blame back in 2020 and 21, when really we needed to be better addressing the critical urgency of contagion.)
1 - https://daily.jstor.org/what-really-made-1950s-housewives-so...
