Were things in the past really that bad for women? (parenthood, legal)
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I was pretty much forced into my first marriage because I was the "oldest fireman's daughter that wasn't married". I was 19.
In HS I had to take all the home ec stuff and hated it all. I lived in a small town and there was no work. Every time I would pick up an out of town newspaper and comment that there were jobs there my parents told me there really weren't more jobs because there were more people there.
The church I was raised in told women their purpose of life was to serve their husbands. They would point out that women were not even counted in the bible, only the men because women were so unimportant.
I am so thankful that I was stubborn and fought that pattern and escaped the town, my parents and eventually five years down the road the marriage.
Women have always worked if they wished. Few wished it, however.
Birth control has been available for over two thousand years.
Women had bank accounts, real estate, and securities. They have owned businesses of their own for centuries.
Women have voted for over a hundred years in all elections and from colonial days in some elections.
This is the goofiest of the bunch.
Really? I'm not that old but I sure do remember my Mom, who never worked because she didn't know how to DO anything, was expected to stay home and clean the house and take care of us.
Birth control? she had no idea that it even existed! All she had was a diaphragm. Never knew about anything else. Try having a Mom from the 50's explain to you what a period was. Not happening! Much less sex....God forbid! When she was 50 and was acting like a witch...I told her about Premarin....again which she had never heard of, and made her go get it. Own anything? are you kidding? Maybe in todays world but not then.
Back when you were considered nothing if you weren't married AND had kids! OH... and the girls that got pregnant while they were still in school? They suddenly disappeared. It was all hush hush. About as opposite from today as you can get.
you say women have owned businesses for centuries? Sure, I know SOME did, but those women are the EXCEPTION. Men didn't allow any of that and certainly wouldn't have made it easy for them. Men have always, even today, looked down on women as second class who could be treaded however they liked.
WHERE do you think the ME TOO movement came from??? Women who made this stuff UP?
I just don't understand this. I'm not saying it didn't happen and I'm not being critical of you but it's as though you had no idea who the man was you married and if you did know, you didn't care and married him anyway.
It sounds like you married a complete stranger and had no idea what his personality was like and how controlling he was. I don't understand. It's as though you lived in the 1700s and your marriage was arranged and you had absolutely no choice.
I understand it. My mother married my father without knowing the "real" him. Apparently he was nothing but sweet and solicitous on their dates, and of course dates were all they had. As a good Roman Catholic girl in 1958, it would no more have occurred to my mother to live with a man or spend the night with him than fly on a rocket to the moon. They courted, he gave her flowers and candy, they went to dinners and shows and so on, and she told me that he was a perfect gentleman.
Then they married, and he turned into a different person: a controlling tyrant addicted to stomping, screaming temper tantrums and outright cruelty. On their honeymoon, she realized she'd made a terrible mistake. But a very short time later, she learned that she was trapped. She was already pregnant with her first child. For a good Catholic girl in 1958, there was no turning back.
I remember my mother was constantly asked about her periods and whether she was pregnant, when she was working as a chemist isolating hormones from animal urine. She was never told that she might absorb the hormones through her skin, which she did! Thank God she didn't have children until over a year after she'd left that job.
I remember my mother wanting to go back to work after she had had two children - my father forbade it. If a woman worked in the 50s, it meant that her husband couldn't support the family. And she had no power, no recourse.
I remember the same issue coming up after she had had two more children, and again my father forbade it. But now it was the late 60's, and she just ignored him, and went back to work. He wound up grateful for her earnings and excellent health insurance, when his business went down the tubes in the 70's.
So many other examples, of how women had no power, and were essentially in the same status as pre-adolescent children, before 1970 or so. I am eternally grateful to the women, my mother and her generation, who made the women's revolution of the late 60's and 1970's. I had a front seat view of this, growing up. I know that today's women who claim not to be feminists, but have the same rights as men - the right to manage their own finances, the right to privacy regarding their bodies and their reproductive choices, the right to not be raped by anyone, including their husbands - would feel very differently if they were suddenly transported back to the 1950s.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to the women of the 1960s and 1970s! They're mostly in their 80s and 90s now, or gone. Soon none of them will be left. But they made the USA a better place for women, just as the civil rights activists of the 50s and 60s made the country a better place for people of color.
In the early 90s, I was taking court reporting classes. Our teacher stood up in a class of all women and read an article about how a woman could get her uterus sealed and never have another period. Naturally, there was a comment by a doctor who was quoted as saying that he would never allow his women patients to do something like that because not having a period went against the natural law of womanhood. Our teacher said, "This is how I feel about what he said" and she crumbled that paper up and threw it in the garbage can. We all applauded...
I am still in shock that even 25 years ago, a man had the audacity to decide for a grown women what she should do based on his opinions. Yet I'm still reminded of it every day today, in 2018, when a woman asks for and can't get her tubes tied because a doctor - not all of them male! - thinks she doesn't know her own mind or thinks she needs to have several kids first or worse, get her husband's permission to do it. I hope that in years to come people will look back on this with as much shock as we look back on people thinking women had to do something bad for a man to rape her.
If you really want to know how bad things were back then, all you have to do is look at the Duggars and their rules for women today. Yes, it was that bad. For all of us then, not just for a few people in a cultish religion.
I think things were just different and it certainly depends where you lived. In Australia women could vote from 1902 and voting became compulsory for all in 1916. Free secular and compulsory education for all was introduced between 1872 and 1880. But equal pay has come late in the workforce, when I started work in the 1970s it was available only in certain occupations. Contraception has been available for a long time and condoms were provided by the government for troops in WW1, though this was kept quiet at home. No fault divorce and supporting parents payments were introduced in the 1970s.
We have only had one female Prime Minister but plenty of State Premiers have been women. But women are not fully represented in executive positions in the workforce partly as the childcare is so expensive.
On a personal level I think it depended very much on the relationship who was in control. I was certainly brought up with the idea that women could do anything but in practice, there are many limitations.
When I was in business school, we had to take a semester-long "charm" class, which was as mandatory to graduating as passing the typing finals. We had to stand up, the teacher inspected our figures, and told us whether or not we needed a "garment" (girdle). We learned how to walk (with a book on our heads), descend stairs, how to get out of a car in a poised ladylike fashion, how to sit like a lady (ALWAYS crossing legs at the ankles) and which fork to use with which course at dinner. We also received milk of magnesia facials and had our eyebrows plucked. I guess it was all part of being groomed to marry the rich boss.
With the exception of the facials, the girdle inspection, and the eyebrow plucking, my secretarial school was the same.
If you had a run in your nylons, you were sent across the street to buy another pair and admonished for not carrying a spare pair in your purse. You did not, of course, wear pants.
I graduated from secretarial school and got a job in an engineering office on a construction site. A week in, one of the guys came up to me and said, "Look, we are in and out of here carting dust and whatnot with us. Please wear jeans and sneakers."
Women have always worked if they wished. Few wished it, however.
Birth control has been available for over two thousand years.
Women had bank accounts, real estate, and securities. They have owned businesses of their own for centuries.
Women have voted for over a hundred years in all elections and from colonial days in some elections.
This is the goofiest of the bunch.
Wow. Such a skewed perspective. The Suffrage movement never happened?
Banks themselves have noted that women couldn't get their own accounts .
Big revelation: every woman doesn't want to be a wife or a mother. Historically speaking, did the average woman have a choice or even aware that they could make a choice?
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