World History Blog: February 2016

(This blog post is going to be a long one due to it being three weeks of blogs stuffed into one.)

Power to the Women! The 80's kicked off with pant suits, a suit for the working female class. It had shoulder pads and some even wore a tie. This new style was a look of power for women. Smoking was still very common, in many of the offices everyone smoked. While working woman did get more common, the amount of women working in computer programming was very low. This was because computers were marketed toward boys, like Tonka Trucks. Because of this, boys would have the advantage of experiences. Because woman started working, the companies started using that to their full advantages. An example of this was the commercial for perfume. It was sold to the 24/7 woman who worked, cleaned, took care of her man and did everything! It was a pressure on women asking them if they could really work and still be feminine. Speaking of working while still being feminine, behold the pant suit! The pant suit was a way for working women in the 80's to get that professional look, yet still be feminine.

I got an interview with my aunt who was a teenager in the 80's, It was fun comparing her teenage years, to mine today. "I was in high school from 1982-1986. I wasn't really one to keep up with the trends of the day, while my sister Lori did! The "in" things at the time for girls were; BIG hair with lots of hairspray, leg warmers, mini-skirts, and sweatshirts with the collar ripped out. People, like especially girls, like talked like this and like totally fer sure loved Madonna and Kevin Bacon (Footloose!). The most popular music of the day was pop music. Besides Madonna, popular singers/groups included Prince, Michael Jackson, The Police, Van Halen, Queen, and the Cars. I don't remember much about the sports of the day- as a teenage girl, I enjoyed watching the Vikings and knew the names of all the players, but I don't think they were all that good. Television in the 80's was awesome! I watched a LOT of TV including: The Cosby Show, Cheers, Miami Vice, Family Ties, the A-Team, Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum P.I., Growing Pains, Full House, Three's Company, Diff'rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Moonlighting, the Wonder Years. The movies were awesome too. The special effects were just starting to improve, but they were not nearly as great as the computer generated stuff of today. My favorites of the day (P.S. I am not recommending you go out and rent these...some of them are questionable in the morals department) were: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Aliens, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Sixteen Candles, and my ALL TIME FAVORITE The Princess Bride. As far as Politics, again, I didn't much care at the time. The President that I recall most was Ronald Reagan. I can't say I was much interested in what was happening in the world either at that time, but I do recall that Mount St. Helen's erupted and that the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded just after launch with a civilian schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe aboard. I also remember that the US and the USSR (Russia) were not friends at that time in history. As far a religion, I never felt persecuted for my faith. I LOVED my youth group and many of my friends today are old youth group friends. The exercise/health fad of the day was aerobics. We loved to do aerobics to the awesome music of the day. Jane Fonda was an actress who got into doing aerobics videos (videos also came out around that time), but I preferred Richard Simmons!. Technology was starting to improve. We got our first VCR in the 80's. It was one of the first ones out to have a remote control, but the remote was attached to the VCR by a long wire that laid across the room. Computers were more popular, with laptop computers just making their debut. Cell phones came out in the 80's too, but they were HUGE and too expensive for the average person to carry. We were excited, though, about the new cordless home phones and call waiting! I lived in the same house from the time I was born to when I moved out for college. We lived in a split level house that my parents had purchased in 1968 for around $30,000. My first car (1985) was a Chevy Chevette with a stick shift. It was a tiny car that got good as mileage, but it was small. So a day in my life went pretty much like this. I woke up to my clock radio at about 6:30 am on a school day. I slept in a totally awesome waterbed in a bedroom with 1 wall covered in a mural of some mountainous place in Europe somewhere. I was able to take a shower, grab a fruit roll-up and be at the bus stop in 20 minutes. My hair froze on cold winter mornings because it was always wet when I went to the bus stop! I would be in school until about 3, then ride the bus home and work on homework. On Wednesdays, I went to youth group and on weekends, there were always neighborhood our youth group people to hang out with. I was part of a group of good kids, but I did know kids who smoked- both cigarettes and marijuana- mostly at school. Those were NOT the cool kids. We went to church on Sundays and very often went out for lunch with another family from church. My idea of fun was hanging out with my friends, going to the mall, watching movies. I really felt kind of isolated from the world in my little suburb. Life seemed simpler then."