SubscribeWOMEN: For President!
The woman of the year 2000 will be an outsize Diana, anthropologists and beauty experts predict. She will be more than six feet tall, wear a size 11 shoe, have shoulders like a wrestler and muscles like a truck driver.
Chances are she will be doing a man’s job, and for this reason will dress to fit her role. Her hair will be cropped short, so as not to get in the way. She probably will wear the most functional clothes in the daytime, go frilly only after dark.
Slacks probably will be her usual workaday costume. These will be of synthetic fiber, treated to keep her warm in winter and cool in summer, admit the beneficial ultra-violet rays and keep out the burning ones. They will be light weight and equipped with pockets for food capsules, which she will eat instead of meat and potatoes.
Her proportions will be perfect, though Amazonian, because science will have perfected a balanced ration of vitamins, proteins and minerals that will produce the maximum bodily efficiency, the minimum of fat.
She will go in for all kinds of sports – probably will compete with men athletes in football, baseball, prizefighting and wrestling.
She’ll be in on all the high-level groups of finance, business and government.
She may even be president.
POLITICS: Freedom Will Survive
How will this land of ours be governed in 50 years?
Much as today, perhaps – with two parties contending against each other and within themselves, with the people free to choose between them, with the winner pressured from all sides yet curbed and guided by a constitution little changed since George Washington’s day.
And yet it is easy to scare ourselves with other possibilities.
Some see us drifting toward the all-powerful state, lulled by the sweet sound of “security.” Some see a need to curb our freedom lest it be used to shield those who plot against us. And some fear our freedom will be hard to save if a general war should come.
What then?
A military dictatorship to restore the nation’s body, if not its soul from the ravages of atomic attack? Some sort of Fascism? Or, in the name of Socialism, some mild or strong control of what we do; directive here, big red “Thou-Shall-Not’s” there?
Some fear the worst. And yet:
We’ve feared the worst, while hoping for the best, ever since we have been a nation. We’ve come through wars and depression. And we’ve come through – free.
Today, almost alone among men, we have the strength – as we may need to prove – to hold the course we choose.
LABOR: A Short Work Week
There is every reason to believe that the steady growth of organized labor in the first half of 1950 will continue along the same trend in the second half of the century.
Labor developed to where it is today from practically nothing at the beginning of the 20th century. It’s still in the process of growth. The various elements and cliques making up the American economy – labor is just one of them – are learning more and more that the national security and well-being requires them to remain strong and work together.
So as labor comes closer to reaching maturity it is likely to win greater acceptance from other elements of American life. This in itself would tend to eliminate some of the great labor-management struggles and create a smoother-working American team.
From every indication labor is in politics to stay, probably playing an expanding role as the years progress. By the end of the century labor may have its own party, as is the case in several European countries.
It’s a good bet, too, that by the end of the century many government plans now avoided as forms of socialism will be accepted as commonplace. Who in 1900 thought that by mid-century there would be government-regulated pensions and a work week limited to 40 hours? A minimum wage, child labor curbs and unemployment compensation?
So tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law.
Movement of people from farms to town, migration from the center of the country to the border states, particularly the Pacific coast and the South, and the movement of city dwellers to the suburbs. These trends will be further stimulated by industrial production needed for the new, long-range defense program and by farm mechanization.
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posted by samsara at 6:58 AM on January 31