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. Girlsâ teams didnât exist in high school, except at all-girlsâ 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 impossibleâthose just werenât realistic goals for a girlâthe latter, especially, because you couldnât 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. CurieâŠbecause, as he put it, âshe was just his wife.â (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 noâa 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 didnât like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, âThank you for proving my pointâŠâ
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 statesâeven in the early 1980sâa man could rape his daughterâŠand 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 âcute.â The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasnât it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high schoolâ1978-79 and 1979-80âbecause, as the principal told me, âOnly boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you wonât use it.â
When I was in collegeâfrom 1980 to 1984âthere were no womensâ studies. The idea hadnât occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professorâa man who had a doctorate in historyâinformed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist becauseâŠwait for itâŠwomensâ 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!!
âŠNo, they WERENâT kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But Iâm afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. Iâve 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 newâwhen the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadnât even begun to come true. When âwomanâs workâ was a sneerâand an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, âReally, itâs a shame sheâs not a boy.â That lack of feminism wasnât all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasnât entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was likeâŠwhen grown men were called âmenâ and grown women were âgirls.â
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