Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury – because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education.
Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When
they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for
their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s
Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that
revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every
dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative
professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized
in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated
differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce
law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as
adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment.
Play college sports
Title IX of the Education
Amendments of protects people from discrimination based
on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal
financial assistance
It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs
The EEOC rules that
sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling
is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to
apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism – this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory.
I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school.
Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
REBLOG FOREVER.
I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to “finish” a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us “harm” or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were “thrown” to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be “practiced” on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses weren’t even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctor’s and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.
When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I won’t go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to “accompany” me so the pharmacist “interview” him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.
Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Father’s signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).
I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.
The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists aren’t a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. Just…look at history. Look at the posts above. We. Must. Resist..
About 8: The State of New York only added No-Fault Divorce as an option in 2010 (!!!)
I want to repeat here.
This is what they mean, when they say “Old-fashioned values”
When conservatives start waxing lyrical about the ‘good old days’, this is what they mean. They are fully aware how much things blew for women, and they would like to return to that.
Take 19th century slaveholder wife Mary Epps. As detailed by Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave, Mary Epps became jealous of her husband Edwin’s frequent rapes of a slave girl named Patsey. Mary began beating Patsey, taking no womanly sympathy for her brutal sexual assaults, instead reducing her to a black jezebel interested in sleeping with her husband. Mary encouraged her husband to discipline Patsey after she had left the plantation without permission, leading him to crack his whip at her over 50 times. Slavery is checkered with untold numbers of Patsey’s, who were dual victims of both their male and female masters. “One white lady that lived near us at McBean slipped in a colored gals room and cut her baby’s head clean off cause it belonged to her husband.” recalled a former slave being interviewed in the WPA Slave Narrative Project.
White Feminists AKA Frenemies
Historically, when white feminists have cried out about the injustices of sexism, they often ignored racism- or perpetuated it. As famed suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have rights that would make them even worse than our saxon fathers?” Susan B. Anthony was in on it too. “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the negro and not the woman.” Notice how this statement effectively erased black women from the conversation. When black men were granted the right to vote in 1870, white suffragists were pissed because they believed they were better than black men. Frances E Willard said “It is not fair that a plantation Negro who can neither read or write should be entrusted with the ballot,” before going on to say black men were dangerous threats to white womanhood. By tapping into white men’s fear of nigger rape, Willard hoped to leverage white womanhood for a few male privileges. White women were women, but more importantly (as they implied), they were white…
…
Faux-Politically Empowered Girlfriends and Wives
These are the women who gained the right to vote in the 1920s and went buckwild. “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.” said Carrie Chapman Catt. As the recent election demonstrated, she was right. While the KKK became more popular in the years leading up to The Great Depression, white protestant women joined the WKKK in droves. Many of them joined when or after their husbands did. Like their male counterparts, they believed their rights were being trampled on by black people and immigrants. They were also terrified of the black rapist, a villain perpetuated by the popular 1916 film, Birth of a Nation. It shouldn’t be shocking that many of these women were former suffragettes. Even though in the present day the KKK’s once mighty power has been whittled down to hundreds of smaller hate groups, the women who aligned themselves with these male dominated arenas are still around. A contemporary version of this white woman is likely to be decked out in confederate flag belts, uses the complete term “the white race” frequently, and has a drug or alcohol problem. She votes however her father/boyfriend/brothers tell her (if she votes in those “rigged zionist abortions” at all, that is), believes white genocide is imminent, and thinks feminism is a cancer.
Polite But Still Racist Southern Belles
Ah, a true classic. As a North Carolina native, Ive come into contact with a dizzying amount of women like this here in the 21st Century. Well-off white women in costly sundresses with withered french manicured hands encrusted in diamonds; who often clutch at their pearls and say “Bless your heart.” They’re always polite, but usually haughty. Some of the ones I’ve come into contact with have praised me for being articulate or pretty, as if smart or pretty black girls are a rarity. I pity the black people who had to deal with these phony bitches during the Jim Crow era, when their negative opinion could get your house set on fire or your husband strung up from a tree. Hiding behind dainty dresses, southern manners, and the assertion that she treated her negro servants like members of the family, the racist southern belle was a fixture on the 20th century American landscape. With a sugary sweet accent, Christian rhetoric, leisurely afternoons spent gossiping and being nosy, and the power of being married to a man that mattered in the eyes of the law, the average southern white woman was an entitled monster. She was fine with negroes as long as they stayed in their place- aka staying subservient to white people. She was also fine with violence against negroes. In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody recalled her employer, Mrs Burke, saying that Emmett Till never would have been murdered had he not ‘forgot his place’. Mrs Burke, and thousands of other women like her, blamed the violent behavior of their husbands, brothers, sons, cousins, and neighbors on black people getting out of place. What a convenient way to excuse depravity from the safehaven of white womanhood.
The “Im a Racist Because Im a Good Mother” Women
Somebody’s child is always being used to justify bullshit. When white parents found out black Ruby Bridges was going to be attending their school, they were pissed. One woman, obviously concerned about the 5 year old Bridges threatening the safety of her own child, threatened to poison Ruby on her daily walks to school. This attitude was repeated by every racist white woman during the integration years. Listen to the woman below use her kids to excuse her racism.
White women being foul racists for the alleged sake of their children was and is common, and made clear by the dozens of unnamed white women you see yelling angrily in historic integration photos. The sadder part? Many have never been identified and never will be.
The Lover of Black Men and Hater of Black Women
This is a relatively new category of white woman, as for the majority of American history miscegenation has been illegal and widely frowned upon. But in the 21st century, this woman thrives. She loves black men and black culture. She publicly applauds black rights. She doesn’t say nigga. She’s cool. She’s down. But at some point, she reveals her true colors and competitive nature. “I love black cock,” she says, signifying that her love for black men isn’t genuine or loyal but instead founded in fetishism. “Black women hate me because black men love me.” she says with total seriousness. Or, “Black girls just mad because they have to wear weave and white girls wear their real hair, THATS WHY WE STEALING YOUR MEN.” Statements like these blatantly reveal her superiority complex with the black woman; whom she hates for being the black man’s counterpart. Clearly, black men are safe from her hatred because they have something she wants- dick and/or validation. Black women though? The mothers, the sisters, the aunts, and the daughters? We’re her enemy.
The Pretty Conduit
Let us go back to Rose Armitage real quick. She seemed innocent and normal until you found out she was raised to kidnap and hypnotize black people for the wanton desires of white family members and friends. Even when Chris KNEW that she was a deranged mayonnaise demon escaped from the deepest pits of hell, he couldn’t bring himself to choke her to death. He looked down at her pretty face and decided that he couldn’t do it. This was one of the scariest parts of the movie to me because it represents America’s response to a type of woman who has grown in popularity thanks to the internet and social media. You already know I’m talking about women like Ann Coulter and Tomi Lahren. She says everything the typical white male racist says- but a sweet voice, a conventionally attractive face, and the privilege of femininity that whiteness grants her keeps the virulent racist bimbo from being labeled as one. Her appearance, gender, and feminine qualities appeal to people that white men can’t. Because of her appearance and status as a white woman, she is protected by white and black men alike. To them she is never angry or bitter, just sassy and passionate. To them she is not racist, just speaking “the truth” or her opinion. In fact, some black men shrug off her racism with a sickening resolve: “I’d still fuck.”
At the end of the film when Rose thought she saw a cop car, she knew she could snap back into victim mode. Had it been a cop instead of Chris’s friend Rod, they’d have seen a bloodied black man looking down on a broken white woman and shot him in a heartbeat. Rose knew she could weave a tale of rape and terror and go on about her life. Not every white woman sucks. But every white woman on this list, and every white woman in real life, has the fake victim card at her disposal. When my former college roommate Elizabeth experienced my reaction to her threat to do me bodily harm, she flipped a switch. She was no longer the vodka fueled instigator making threats and acting tough. She was suddenly crying in the hallway, inconsolable and weak. This is white womanhood. This is their ultimate privilege. At any moment they can go from agitator or abuser to a delicate and innocent white woman in need of protection from the big scary black. Even worse, not every black man or woman will be fortunate enough to have a friend like Rod to come save them when they’ve been accused of violence by a white woman, or when they were simply black in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many have been, and will continue to be caught in the web of faux innocence, lies, and evil spun by white women.
Perhaps this is why Get Out is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen.
Create a mess 