My dad always paid the bills, even after he got sick. After he died I remember my mom talking about how now she was going to have to start paying the bills. It's one of those things that just sticks in my memory for some reason.
My parents also only ever had one e-mail address between them. At first it was my dad's school address, then after he left grad school they got an AOL account. My mom still uses that AOL address.
I was going to add something along the lines of "snail mail:e-mail::landline:cell phone", but I assume that's been done.
Hasn't it been surprisingly* common, historically, for women to handle the household finances? They didn't call it home economics for nothing.
*Based on current/recent stereotypes about past gender roles.
Why not each have your own, after all?
Because they think of email as a new version of the home telephone, I suspect. One number/account per household/family. My parents share an email account, and I'm pretty sure that's how they see it.
My mother always handled the family finances. It had nothing to do with feminism, or anything like that, but was rather, so far as I understood it, an old-fashioned arrangement: A man, if he's a good man, provides for his family by turning over his pay to the wife/mother of the household, who then looks after the details.
A man, if he's a good man, provides for his family by turning over his pay to the wife/mother of the household, who then looks after the details.
Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking of.
My parents, being employed by a university and a government agency, respectively, each had their own email addresses before anybody I knew had even heard of email. But for the first several years that they had web access at home, they still maintained a joint email account there. I don't know if they thought a yahoo account would be an extravagance or what. It was a little strange.
Countdown to the two-pay-packets anecdote…
I'm wondering how long it will be before my parents decide they need separate laptops. I guess it might never happen, since they have a desktop and a laptop, but I'm betting it will be within the next year.
I was about to bring up the two-pay packets anecdote, but then nosflow had to ruin it for everybody.
When people used the email that corresponded with their ISP account's user id, it made sense to have a single email address.
ISPs still market the option of having multiple e-mail addresses as a selling point (rather than as a default to be expected). I take this is aimed at old people the not so heavy internet user market.
I guess this thread was prompted by Di's appalling anecdote on the other thread?
These days I would sort of expect Facebook to subvert the "joint e-mail" paradigm, since more and more people seem to send FB messages instead of email (grumble/sigh). Who would've thought there might be a way Facebook could enhance privacy?
Who would've thought there might be a way Facebook could enhance privacy?
Don't tell Zuckerberg.
I know people who have joint Facebook accounts. Admittedly not many.
We have two email accounts, mine and a joint one, which only Mrs OFE uses. I originally set up three, one for each of us and a joint one for joint purchase receipts etc., but she's never used hers, so the joint one is hers by default.
A man, if he's a good man, provides for his family by turning over his pay to the wife/mother of the household, who then looks after the details.
My dad "provided for his family", but he also did the bills and stuff. This was probably a bad idea, because he was incredibly financially naive compared to my mum. But we never got ripped off as thoroughly as he deserved. When he died, Mum made the money go a lot further.
Going back a generation, when my maternal grandfather died, my parents, who were his executors, discovered that my grandmother didn't even know how to write a cheque.
My parents basically share an email address, even though my mum technically has her own. But that's because she's astoundingly technophobic. She can't seem to generalise any technological process/UI metaphor, like opening an application or setting the video timer. I used to have to right a highly detailed list of instructions from a specific start point for every single thing she wanted to do with a gadget.
My aunt and uncle share one which I find weird. They also have a joint facebook account. My aunt is the one who does most of the writing.
I asked her to open a gmail account which she could download to her hard drive for private stuff. I know that couples share a lot of stuff, but I might want to tell her something and not her husband.
I did not see 12 before I posted 16, but as I said my aunt maintains a joint facebook account for them.
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So while we're having a nice quiet day of remembrance, the rest of the world is on about gender and tobacco?
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I don't quite get this extension-of-the-telephone business as a rationale for sharing an address. Sure, you may have shared a phone number, but that doesn't mean that you're both always talking/listening to whoever is on the other end of the line. And with paper mail, it all goes to the same place in the house, but I'd still think it's weird to open up letters addressed to my partner and not to me.
I recall once ending a trite party conversation with a piece of sarcasm, "Oh wow, different people do things differently!", or something to that effect. I think we were all second or third years, so all that "people from California do this, people from New York do that" pablum was played out.
Congratulations on having four grandparents still around and web-active. The last of my four died in January and I'm 22; I wonder what the average number of grandparents still alive is, depending on one's age.
Congratulations on having four grandparents still around and web-active.
It's nothing I did, really. Turns out they were all really Catholic about the whole birth-control thing, as were my own parents. That and some prodigious fucking, I suspect.
21: Well, that is true in my case too, but what that ended up meaning was that my mom was the youngest of nine and my dad the third of five, and then I'm the youngest and as such born relatively late in their lives, and so one grandfather was dead before I was born, one died when I was three, one grandmother (aged 94) died when I was in 10th grade, and my last grandmother (also 94) died when I was a sophomore in college.
We have a joint account that goes way, way back to an early dial-up ISP around here which we still pay for because it is so simple <lastname>@nb.net (and we have it linked to many different things). I now use several other ones and have urged my wife to make her own (which I don't think she has), but she basically uses the joint one as her own and I almost never check it.
20: Three grandfolks still alive, and I'm 28. The oldest of them is, I believe, 85.
My parents have had separate email accounts for a long time now. My dad does a lot of ebay buying/selling, and I think my mom was sick of wading through ebay emails to find stuff from family.
What's this "email" thingy?
We have separate accounts, mainly for sorting purposes. Email (on a different desktop than this one) sent to me gets automatically put in a folder she never looks at and I never check. Every quarter I go back for forgotten passwords and say:"Sumagun, so-and-so emailed me two months ago."
She also handles the bills and finances.
Interestingly, Molly and I have separate emails, but one cell phone.
My parents have 2 desktops and 2 laptops in their house, and wouldn't dream of sharing email addresses.
When I got pregnant with Kid A (I was 25), C and I had 6 parents/stepparents and 6 grandparents between us. (He'd lost one when he was 9, and I'd lost one when I was 16.) Killed a grandparent with each pregnancy, plus an extra 2 deaths which weren't my fault.
I'm an Emersonian when it comes to relationships, but if I weren't my ideal would be to simply hand over my paycheck and receive an allowance. Let her do the shit work of bill paying and budgeting. I will kill the spiders and snake the drains.