Were things in the past really that bad for women? (call, year)
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What is really funny, is all the people who ask "What was it like back when . . . ", and those of us who lived through it tell them, and then they refuse to believe it.
But could the pill have been invented when the condom was? Women did not have their own form of birth control, but didn't that have essentially to do with a lack scientific knowledge about how to make such a medication. Therefore, no control from the female side, unless the man was willing to use the device he had.
This is not the same as depriving women of control devices.
I don't think anyone said they were deprived of it, just that they didn't have the choice whether to have kids if not.
There were some states per the links posted that did not allow women access to it when first introduced, maybe that is what you're thinking of.
Really in a way it's still happening, as access to birth control via Planned Parenthood is being lost, the only option for many poor women (ironically the people who should have the easiest access to birth control), and many in government want laws stating birth control can be disallowed on employee prescription plans (while Viagra is not an issue). Many women take the pill for hormone regulation as well, it's not just birth control but has other uses).
Yes I like that irony too. Some are people who weren't even alive then, but they "call BS" on personal accounts of experiences nonetheless
Again I don't know why this topic engenders so much hostility and defensiveness by some men here. No one is attacking men, just telling it like it was.
You got lucky, or you were smarter than the rest of us. My parents sent my brother to college to get a degree in chemistry, they offered me two options; secretarial school or cosmetology.
Being late to this thread which has so many responses that I have little time to slog through them all, I can tell you that yes indeed some of us did get lucky and for me extremely lucky and it was a chancy decision at the time.
I started my college career, in 1967, with a major in music education although the last thing I wanted to do was teach. I dropped out after two years. An uncle of mine convinced me that I might try something vastly different: I enrolled in a local community/jr college for a year long data processing/computer programming course.
There were a few young women like me in my class but I'm probably the only one who stuck with it and ended up with a decades long career in, what we today call tech or IT. To make a long story short that year of computer study opened up an entire universe of opportunity for me as my computing experiences transitioned from the IBM mainframes of the late 1960s to Cloud server data centers today.
Being late to this thread which has so many responses that I have little time to slog through them all, I can tell you that yes indeed some of us did get lucky and for me extremely lucky and it was a chancy decision at the time.
I started my college career, in 1967, with a major in music education although the last thing I wanted to do was teach. I dropped out after two years. An uncle of mine convinced me that I might try something vastly different: I enrolled in a local community/jr college for a year long data processing/computer programming course.
There were a few young women like me in my class but I'm probably the only one who stuck with it and ended up with a decades long career in, what we today call tech or IT. To make a long story short that year of computer study opened up an entire universe of opportunity for me as my computing experiences transitioned from the IBM mainframes of the late 1960s to Cloud server data centers today.
This is a great story. Thanks for sharing.
I had a boss who had a similar experience. She pursued a degree in math in the 60s at the urging of her mother and ended up in what was then known as the Electronics Department in our company.
The AMA used to have a "guideline" (not a law) that a woman's age times her number of live children had to equal 120 or no go. Maybe it was the association for GYNs and OBs. But there was no legal binding fact to it, they were just shoving people around their own prejudices.
That's strange. I had my tubes tied at 36. I have 2 kids. I'm 51 now. When was this guideline a part of the AMA?
Last edited by piperdiva; 03-20-2018 at 07:43 AM..
I don't think anyone said they were deprived of it, just that they didn't have the choice whether to have kids if not.
There were some states per the links posted that did not allow women access to it when first introduced, maybe that is what you're thinking of.
Really in a way it's still happening, as access to birth control via Planned Parenthood is being lost, the only option for many poor women (ironically the people who should have the easiest access to birth control), and many in government want laws stating birth control can be disallowed on employee prescription plans (while Viagra is not an issue). Many women take the pill for hormone regulation as well, it's not just birth control but has other uses).
I understand. And I have worked with women who used the pill for hormone regulation as you mention.
I agree that this particular situation is worsening, and it will/is affecting that part of the population who can least afford gangs of children....and yet they will be denounced from political platforms and sites like this one for making themselves poor with too many kids.
These are people who "can't win for losin'" They are caught in a political meat grinder.
I no longer live in the U.S., I live in what was until recent times a rigidly R.C. country, but one where the secular law now no longer reflects the discipline of that religion. Women have no barriers to birth control pills nor "morning after" medication. The abortion laws were liberalized by popular vote, and then later expanded again over the opposition of the then president.
...There were a few young women like me in my class but I'm probably the only one who stuck with it and ended up with a decades long career in, what we today call tech or IT. To make a long story short that year of computer study opened up an entire universe of opportunity for me as my computing experiences transitioned from the IBM mainframes of the late 1960s to Cloud server data centers today.
You sound just like the women I worked with in a computer center in Manhattan in the early/mid Seventies. They seemed in some cases to have just fallen into computing, with those well-remember IBM mainframes (we were a juicy customer for IBM) and on and on it went to the Clouds.
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