![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes to self- cultural/social elements of the 1950s that should at least be referenced in prewar Fallout fic in some way:
- Social status of women
- Absence or prevalence of birth control
- Social status of African-Americans
- Did people even admit that anyone other than heterosexuals existed
- Polio
- Quality or lack thereof of rock and roll music
- Clothing styles of both genders; prevalence of use of hats
- Attitude towards food (homemade from scratch vs. ease of preparation from cans and kits, etc.)
- Racial attitudes towards anybody who was neither white nor Chinese
- Social status of Catholics
- Whether or not Vatican II happened
- Status of Jews and Judaism in general
- Why Vault-Tec could get away with capitalizing the first letter of 'Holocaust' on multiple posters in the DC area despite not capitalizing all the first letters in that sentence
- Attitudes towards smoking
- Attitudes towards diseases that could not be mentioned in public
- Government policy towards Native Americans (AIM wasn't founded until 1968, after all)
- Television in general
- Movies in general
- Music recordings esp. perishable ones
There's a hell of a lot more, of course, but these are things that are coming to mind off the top of my head. To start with, the women.
Women appear in a number of ads from before the War in FO3 and Fallout New Vegas. Several of them are of the Suzy Homemaker type. One of them is an ad for Nuka-Cola that depicts something like a cross between Rosie the Riveter and a pinup. Bethesda put out some in-universe ads that are probably not really considered canon but that give a good impression of the world depicted; the one for Vaults in general points out to the stereotypical family's daughter that she might meet someone special in the Vault and be able to get to work repopulating America. The tour of the model Vault in the Museum of Technology happily advertises the ease of cooking, cleaning, and child care to moms who might be passing through. Granted, these are all mere shreds of evidence left after two hundred years, but they're the best we have to work with outside of ads for specific casinos in New Vegas.
The only other depictions of women before the War show up in the form of VR simulations, one of which is socially idyllic right up until the bastard in charge starts torturing people and one of which is the product of a slightly deranged general's insistence on manipulating how the Anchorage Campaign went. The Tranquility Lane sim only depicts home life and does not provide any kind of external settings for anyone; there is no indication that it is anything other than Saturday, or that anyone ever gets to leave the area in the cars in their driveways. I don't even think there are any streets leading out of the main area. Dr. Braun was mostly interested in an idyllic setting that hid horror under the surface, not accurately depicting anything of broader society.
The Anchorage sim, on the other hand, was the result of a rah-rah gung-ho general putting his stamp on what was originally supposed to be an accurate depiction of prewar military society. For someone who was probably steeped in a culture with very specific gender expectations, General Chase appears to have been relatively liberated in his thinking. Female soldiers show up in winterized armor pretty frequently- I think maybe one in every seven or eight of the armored soldiers in the Anchorage sim was female. The primary medical doctor on staff at base HQ is also female. I don't recall there being nurses; there may or may not have been. Point is, actual military doctor, actual female. Compare this to, say, M*A*S*H. Did that show ever have a female character who wasn't a nurse or a civilian?
Also worth noting: Mothership Zeta includes a medic unit from the Anchorage campaign, although you only meet one (potentially three) of them alive. Out of six abductees from this unit, one of them is female, and holds the rank of Corporal. If you successfully revive the two who are still in cryo rather than on the dissection slab, they are both decent shots with assault rifles or other weapons handed to them despite being medics. It is probably safe to assume that a) all soldiers, medics and chaplains included, received the same full combat training and practice, and b) there genuinely were women in the combat ranks, rather than just being a product of General Chase's wishful thinking. More than that, they were in combat ranks alongside men rather than in segregated units.
The New Vegas add-on Old World Blues included one female mad scientist brain on its roster of six mad scientist brains (I am assuming Doctor 8 was male before becoming a floating brain in a jar because all the other brains refer to Doctor 8 as 'he' and 'him'). Speaking with your own brain in the endgame of OWB indicates that it has a male voice synthesizer because female ones are rare and hard to come by in Big Mountain, despite there being a handful of female voices in your headquarters and a female voice installed in the stealth suit. The female computers are, almost without exception, treated as faintly ditzy, but this can at least in part be chalked up to them being programmed by an individual who was extremely eccentric to begin with.
So. Women in the military and in combat ranks. Women at home repeatedly and frequently depicted as happy homemakers and baby factories in skirts- all pre-War ordinary clothing outfits have two models, so if a male character puts the outfit on he gets pants but a female character gets a skirt. Women do show up in the business world, though; several prewar businesses with computer terminals feature emails from or about women. At least one of these companies includes a direct reference to company policies forbidding 'harassment, sexual or otherwise' between employees, which is way more than you'd expect for the 50s. OTOH that particular company also had policies requiring people to carry low grade military hardware at all times, so they may have been exceptionally forward thinking.
It would appear that the pre-War Falloutverse was rather more of a man's world, but not as strictly defined in its roles as it might once have been. The Resource Wars had to have have influenced this, but so would the advent of personal and household robotics. Factory jobs that would have originally been held by men would have been more likely to get filled by robots than by women, since robots didn't have pesky tendencies to ask for money or respect or time to sleep. Office jobs, on the other hand, would require more initiative than even the most sophisticated robots in common use could handle. And while auto-docs existed that could perform emergency and other surgeries in a hurry, they were all location-based and rather awkward at best. Women would have been in demand to work outside the home in socially-facing positions where the fellas would appreciate a pretty face more than an efficient machine. They would have shown up in higher office and academic positions as the War dragged on, and also as the economy started to get ugly- remember, the oil fields of Texas ran dry in the 2050s, and in The Pitt there are computer records of labor riots taking place when robots were brought in to take the place of male factory workers. Women would have, by 1950s thinking, been a cheaper but socially acceptable alternative to men; anti-harassment policies would have been a sop to the little ladies' personal dignity and maybe get their husbands to stop showing up and making a stink about other men messing around with their wives.
As for the women soldiers, I have no doubt that they were originally not supposed to take the field, let alone fight alongside men. It is worth noting that in the Anchorage sim there is not one female Chinese soldier, technician, or Crimson Dragoon depicted. Either the Chinese kept their women to other forms of serving the Great Patriotic Whatever, or General Chase could not conceive of Commies sending women to war and ordered the Chinese female soldiers erased. It would not surprise me much if the Chinese policy of the time kept female soldiers fighting on Chinese soil, since indications are that attempts were being made to assault the Chinese mainland almost as soon as Alaska was reclaimed. Possibly they billed it as a way to keep women from being exposed to insatiable American lusts and being forced to bear the shame of half-breed babies, because 1950s, hello. I know there are no female faces on the Chinese propaganda posters you see in Operation Anchorage, but you only see one design of those... anyway. The female armored soldiers in the Anchorage sim are not wearing medic armor (it's marked with a red cross), so I am assuming that most of them are not just doctors with guns. General Chase obviously thought they belonged on the battlefield or he would've erased them the same way he ordered Vertibirds inserted into the sim despite their not existing yet. A handful of female infantry had to have existed as of January of 2077; I suspect that they only really started to be a thing after the Chinese invasion of Alaska. They may not have been taken as seriously as the guys, but they were allowed to fight and exist outside of support positions. Probably the majority of them were considered uberpatriotic freaks even by highly motivated soldier standards.
Powered armor units may have been partially responsible for this change in attitude. It first appeared in the late 2060s and it was highly inefficient, but it got refined rapidly over time. Anything that amps its wearer's strength as much as power armor does, and provides as much defense as power armor does, pretty quickly obliterates nine-tenths of the arguments against women in combat positions. The remaining tenth is the social attitudes and perception tenth. Since many of the women in the Anchorage sim were not in power armor but ordinary combat armor, it may have been a case of the Army deciding to enlist women for combat roles with the promise of getting them into power armor units as soon as they earned their way in. This would be consistent with the relatively low percentage of women seen in both the simulated armed forces and the medic unit sample on board Mothership Zeta.
That's my general line of thought, at least. There's more, but that's where I start getting into stuff about robots and also stuff about birth control, so I'm gonna put that in a separate post.
- Social status of women
- Absence or prevalence of birth control
- Social status of African-Americans
- Did people even admit that anyone other than heterosexuals existed
- Polio
- Quality or lack thereof of rock and roll music
- Clothing styles of both genders; prevalence of use of hats
- Attitude towards food (homemade from scratch vs. ease of preparation from cans and kits, etc.)
- Racial attitudes towards anybody who was neither white nor Chinese
- Social status of Catholics
- Whether or not Vatican II happened
- Status of Jews and Judaism in general
- Why Vault-Tec could get away with capitalizing the first letter of 'Holocaust' on multiple posters in the DC area despite not capitalizing all the first letters in that sentence
- Attitudes towards smoking
- Attitudes towards diseases that could not be mentioned in public
- Government policy towards Native Americans (AIM wasn't founded until 1968, after all)
- Television in general
- Movies in general
- Music recordings esp. perishable ones
There's a hell of a lot more, of course, but these are things that are coming to mind off the top of my head. To start with, the women.
Women appear in a number of ads from before the War in FO3 and Fallout New Vegas. Several of them are of the Suzy Homemaker type. One of them is an ad for Nuka-Cola that depicts something like a cross between Rosie the Riveter and a pinup. Bethesda put out some in-universe ads that are probably not really considered canon but that give a good impression of the world depicted; the one for Vaults in general points out to the stereotypical family's daughter that she might meet someone special in the Vault and be able to get to work repopulating America. The tour of the model Vault in the Museum of Technology happily advertises the ease of cooking, cleaning, and child care to moms who might be passing through. Granted, these are all mere shreds of evidence left after two hundred years, but they're the best we have to work with outside of ads for specific casinos in New Vegas.
The only other depictions of women before the War show up in the form of VR simulations, one of which is socially idyllic right up until the bastard in charge starts torturing people and one of which is the product of a slightly deranged general's insistence on manipulating how the Anchorage Campaign went. The Tranquility Lane sim only depicts home life and does not provide any kind of external settings for anyone; there is no indication that it is anything other than Saturday, or that anyone ever gets to leave the area in the cars in their driveways. I don't even think there are any streets leading out of the main area. Dr. Braun was mostly interested in an idyllic setting that hid horror under the surface, not accurately depicting anything of broader society.
The Anchorage sim, on the other hand, was the result of a rah-rah gung-ho general putting his stamp on what was originally supposed to be an accurate depiction of prewar military society. For someone who was probably steeped in a culture with very specific gender expectations, General Chase appears to have been relatively liberated in his thinking. Female soldiers show up in winterized armor pretty frequently- I think maybe one in every seven or eight of the armored soldiers in the Anchorage sim was female. The primary medical doctor on staff at base HQ is also female. I don't recall there being nurses; there may or may not have been. Point is, actual military doctor, actual female. Compare this to, say, M*A*S*H. Did that show ever have a female character who wasn't a nurse or a civilian?
Also worth noting: Mothership Zeta includes a medic unit from the Anchorage campaign, although you only meet one (potentially three) of them alive. Out of six abductees from this unit, one of them is female, and holds the rank of Corporal. If you successfully revive the two who are still in cryo rather than on the dissection slab, they are both decent shots with assault rifles or other weapons handed to them despite being medics. It is probably safe to assume that a) all soldiers, medics and chaplains included, received the same full combat training and practice, and b) there genuinely were women in the combat ranks, rather than just being a product of General Chase's wishful thinking. More than that, they were in combat ranks alongside men rather than in segregated units.
The New Vegas add-on Old World Blues included one female mad scientist brain on its roster of six mad scientist brains (I am assuming Doctor 8 was male before becoming a floating brain in a jar because all the other brains refer to Doctor 8 as 'he' and 'him'). Speaking with your own brain in the endgame of OWB indicates that it has a male voice synthesizer because female ones are rare and hard to come by in Big Mountain, despite there being a handful of female voices in your headquarters and a female voice installed in the stealth suit. The female computers are, almost without exception, treated as faintly ditzy, but this can at least in part be chalked up to them being programmed by an individual who was extremely eccentric to begin with.
So. Women in the military and in combat ranks. Women at home repeatedly and frequently depicted as happy homemakers and baby factories in skirts- all pre-War ordinary clothing outfits have two models, so if a male character puts the outfit on he gets pants but a female character gets a skirt. Women do show up in the business world, though; several prewar businesses with computer terminals feature emails from or about women. At least one of these companies includes a direct reference to company policies forbidding 'harassment, sexual or otherwise' between employees, which is way more than you'd expect for the 50s. OTOH that particular company also had policies requiring people to carry low grade military hardware at all times, so they may have been exceptionally forward thinking.
It would appear that the pre-War Falloutverse was rather more of a man's world, but not as strictly defined in its roles as it might once have been. The Resource Wars had to have have influenced this, but so would the advent of personal and household robotics. Factory jobs that would have originally been held by men would have been more likely to get filled by robots than by women, since robots didn't have pesky tendencies to ask for money or respect or time to sleep. Office jobs, on the other hand, would require more initiative than even the most sophisticated robots in common use could handle. And while auto-docs existed that could perform emergency and other surgeries in a hurry, they were all location-based and rather awkward at best. Women would have been in demand to work outside the home in socially-facing positions where the fellas would appreciate a pretty face more than an efficient machine. They would have shown up in higher office and academic positions as the War dragged on, and also as the economy started to get ugly- remember, the oil fields of Texas ran dry in the 2050s, and in The Pitt there are computer records of labor riots taking place when robots were brought in to take the place of male factory workers. Women would have, by 1950s thinking, been a cheaper but socially acceptable alternative to men; anti-harassment policies would have been a sop to the little ladies' personal dignity and maybe get their husbands to stop showing up and making a stink about other men messing around with their wives.
As for the women soldiers, I have no doubt that they were originally not supposed to take the field, let alone fight alongside men. It is worth noting that in the Anchorage sim there is not one female Chinese soldier, technician, or Crimson Dragoon depicted. Either the Chinese kept their women to other forms of serving the Great Patriotic Whatever, or General Chase could not conceive of Commies sending women to war and ordered the Chinese female soldiers erased. It would not surprise me much if the Chinese policy of the time kept female soldiers fighting on Chinese soil, since indications are that attempts were being made to assault the Chinese mainland almost as soon as Alaska was reclaimed. Possibly they billed it as a way to keep women from being exposed to insatiable American lusts and being forced to bear the shame of half-breed babies, because 1950s, hello. I know there are no female faces on the Chinese propaganda posters you see in Operation Anchorage, but you only see one design of those... anyway. The female armored soldiers in the Anchorage sim are not wearing medic armor (it's marked with a red cross), so I am assuming that most of them are not just doctors with guns. General Chase obviously thought they belonged on the battlefield or he would've erased them the same way he ordered Vertibirds inserted into the sim despite their not existing yet. A handful of female infantry had to have existed as of January of 2077; I suspect that they only really started to be a thing after the Chinese invasion of Alaska. They may not have been taken as seriously as the guys, but they were allowed to fight and exist outside of support positions. Probably the majority of them were considered uberpatriotic freaks even by highly motivated soldier standards.
Powered armor units may have been partially responsible for this change in attitude. It first appeared in the late 2060s and it was highly inefficient, but it got refined rapidly over time. Anything that amps its wearer's strength as much as power armor does, and provides as much defense as power armor does, pretty quickly obliterates nine-tenths of the arguments against women in combat positions. The remaining tenth is the social attitudes and perception tenth. Since many of the women in the Anchorage sim were not in power armor but ordinary combat armor, it may have been a case of the Army deciding to enlist women for combat roles with the promise of getting them into power armor units as soon as they earned their way in. This would be consistent with the relatively low percentage of women seen in both the simulated armed forces and the medic unit sample on board Mothership Zeta.
That's my general line of thought, at least. There's more, but that's where I start getting into stuff about robots and also stuff about birth control, so I'm gonna put that in a separate post.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-01 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-01 04:41 pm (UTC)