BELOW, I have turned a few of my “favorite” quotes from history, regarding the second-class status of women, into posters.
The pictures, I have made myself, often scanning them from old books. The bust of Susan B. Anthony, I photographed myself.
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Susan B. Anthony: A giant in the fight for equality. |
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IN COLONIAL DAYS, most men and women would have agreed: the female brain was inferior to the male. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts captures that belief in a journal entry on April 13th, 1645.
Mr. Hopkins, of Hartford, Connecticut, has brought his wife to Boston. Winthrop calls her:
…(a godly young woman, and of special parts) who has fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers [many] years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error when it was too late. If she had attended her household affairs and such things as belonged to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set for her.
MEN OUTNUMBERED women in the early colonies, making marriageable females a valuable commodity. In 1666, George Alsop writes a book about the colony of Maryland.
In it, as Paige Smith writes, he declares,
The Women that go over into this Province as Servants, have the best luck as in any place of the world besides; for they are no sooner on shoar, but they are courted into a Copulative Matrimony, which some of them (for aught I know) had they not come to such a Market with their Virginity, might have kept it then until it had been moldy. (45/38)
Nicholas Cresswell also described Maryland as “a paradise on Earth for women. … that great curiosity, an Old Maid is seldom seen in this country. They generally marry before they are twenty-two, often before they are sixteen.” (45/38-39)
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“Artificial paintings.”
IN 1692, Cotton Mather puts some of his thoughts on women down on paper. Paige Smith notes:
The familiar anxieties about feminine sexuality show clearly enough in Mather’s rather feverish strictures against those shameless women who indulged in “artificial paintings” of their faces. Beauty was a gift of God and a temptation to vanity. The beautiful woman should be especially careful “lest … she deceive Unwary men, into those amours which bewitching looks and smiles too often betrayed the Children of men.”
“The wicked Harlots of old,” he reminded his readers, “Painted their Eyes … their Eye-browes and Lids, which they ting’ed with a Preparation of Antimony to Blacken them, and Beautify ‘em.” Makeup should be avoided because an “Adulterate complexion” may easily become an “Adulterous” one. Perhaps the most telling argument, the practical one, was that makeup would “corrupt, corrode and poison” the face and thereby “hasten Wrinkles and Ruines thereupon.” Beauty spots were “Tokens of a Plague of the Soul,” and women should be careful not to expose their back and breasts less they “Enkindle foul fire in the Male.”
It was , above all, “Promiscuous Dancing” that was the particular snare of the devil. In dancing where men and women “Leap and fling about like Bedlams” all Ten Commandments were broken.
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WITH A NEW U.S. CONSTITUTION being drafted, Joseph Dyer earned a reputation as an extremist, “at least as great as any of the wild Men of the French Revolution.” Dyer believed a perfect equality of suffrage was essential to liberty.
John Adams asked if that meant suffrage “of Women, of Children, of Idiots, of Madmen, of Criminals, or Prisoners for Debt or for Crimes.” (45/59)
1784, Elias Boudinot offers his niece, who is planning to marry, the following advice in a letter:
Your duty to man, depends in the performance of it, on the fulfillment of your duty to God. Your domestic connections will call for your particular attention. Here you must not forget that your husband should be the first object of it. By your union, you have submitted to him as your head and superior. I know that it is a favorable observation with many, that husband and wife are equal and there should be no superiority. This is not true, but a dangerous error, from whence many disagreeable consequences flow.
It is true, neither in theory or practice. In point of merit, perhaps it may be strictly true, but in point of order, God has thought proper to make it otherwise, and that for the punishment of sin…
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1807: New Jersey alters its laws, which had for more than three decades, allowed women to vote. In 1776, the new state, had decreed that all “inhabitants” could vote as long as “they” could prove they had property worth more than 50 pounds. In 1797, a new law regarding voters used the phrase, “he or she.” Most married women gave over all their property to their spouses, and so lost the right to vote, but in 1800, one Jersey lawmaker was clear. “Our constitution gives this right to maids and widows, white and black,” he said.
Seven years later, in part in reaction to charges of voter fraud, New Jersey blocked “petticoat electors” from voting in future elections.
(For the first time, African Americans were also barred.)
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1820s: In novels of this era, Paige Smith notes that even heroines often oppose anything like women’s rights. In one, the lead female character is clear, that “women were secondary objects of creation. … Nor have we any right to require of superior men an example of the virtue to which he would train us. … Our state of society is a dependent one,” she says, “and it is ours to be good and amiable, whatever may be the conduct of the men to whom we are subjected.” Helen Wells, in the Step-Mother, endorsed the axiom that the man was “lord and master, from whose will there is no appeal.” (45/72)
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1837: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. later describes the treatment of young women in this era like so:
They braced my aunt against a board
To make her straight and tall,
They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light and small.
They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
They screwed it up with pins –
Oh, never mortal suffered more
In penance for her sins. (Earle, 109)
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1847: When the survivors of the
Donner Party are finally rescued, one rescuer asks Virginia Reed to marry him.
She was not yet 14. Three months later, she wrote a cousin in Springfield,
Illinois, “Tell the girls that this is the greatest place for marrying they
ever saw and that they must come to California if they want to marry.” She
stood at the altar herself, before the year was out (5/418-419).
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| Mott was one of the delegates at the Seneca Falls meeting in 1848. |
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When the "bloomer" style first came in, both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton adopted it. They were mocked for trying to be men; and even they gave into the pressure. |
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I would imagine that students might have a lively discussion, if you asked them to explain what they think Susan B. Anthony, or someone else from this list, would think about the roles open to women today. (I’m retired – and never thought of that question until now.)
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1850: Dr. Wendell Holmes, professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard convinces the faculty to admit women to the medical school. The undergraduates overrule the decision. Their resolutions are published in the Boston Transcript, copied widely, and “hailed with wide acclaim.”
Resolved that no woman of true delicacy would be willing, in the presence of men, to listen to the discussion of subjects that necessarily come under the consideration of students of medicine;
Resolved that we are not opposed to allowing woman her rights, but we do protest against her appearing in places where her presence is calculated to destroy our respect for the modesty and delicacy of her sex. (113/103)
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1851: Ruth Finley writes, “The first invention that relieved women in their personal, work-a-day lives was the sewing machine. Isaac Merritt Singer was the pioneer manufacturer in this country, taking out his patents early in 1851…
Other “important” developments for women included a “particularly useful rotary egg-beater” and a “double skillet for boiling milk,” which saved the cook from constantly stirring. (113/158)
NOTE TO TEACHERS: This question never seemed to fail. I liked to ask my classes what invention or development in the last hundred years had most impacted the place of women in society?
My answer, which I explained, as necessary, after all ideas from the class were exhausted, was: The Pill.
Birth control. (My own mother had been a college graduate, but she was pregnant eleven times, between 1936 and 1959.)
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1853: Susan B. Anthony remarks: “One half of American women are dolls, the rest are drudges, and we’re all fools.”
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“The true cultivation of feminine talents.”
September 30, 1860: Sarah Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, writes to Matthew Vassar and offers support for his plan to open a college for women.
I feel you will excuse this application when I say that for the long period of my editorial life woman’s education…has been my constant study and theme. … I shall rejoice to aid in your good plan, by making the readers of the Lady’s Book your earnest friends as they cannot but honor a gentleman who is thus earnest to promote the true cultivation of feminine talents.
We want true women trained to the full arc of their powers of mind, heart and soul, and taught to devote all to their duties as women; then the world would be better as well as wiser. (209)
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1861: Vassar College opens its doors to 353 students, paying $350 for tuition and residence. It is the first college for women in the country.
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| Dr. Walker had helped save the lives of many soldiers during the Civil War. Later, in protest, she began to dress like a man. Several times she was arrested. |
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1870: There are only 930 women office workers in the country;
that number would grow to 386,765 by 1910 (Time-Life books).
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| Happy home, c. 1875. |
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“Their Divinely appointed sphere.”
December 1877: Sarah Josepha Hale lays down her editorial pen, in her last essay for Godey’s Lady’s Book.
And now, having reached my ninetieth year, I must bid farewell
to my countrywomen, with the hope that this work of half a century may be blessed
to the furtherance of their happiness and usefulness in their
Divinely appointed sphere. New avenues for higher culture and for good
works are opening before them, which fifty years ago were unknown. That they
may improve these opportunities, and be faithful to their high vocation, is my
heartfelt prayer. (113/312-313)
Finley describes Hale as, “A liberal of liberals, she was superlatively brilliant in four things – her energies, her sympathies, her vision and her judgments.” (113/311)
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1893: Lucy Stone, one of the giants in the fight for equality for women, gives her last public speech at the Congress for Women in Chicago. At one point she notes that women have always been second-class citizens.
____________________
“If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar.”
Lucy Stone
____________________
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1890: Voltairine de Cleyre, born in Leslie, Michigan in 1866, gives a lecture on the topic of “Sex Slavery.”
“Let woman ask herself, ‘Why am I the slave of man? Why is
my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally
with his?’” she told the assembled crowd.
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1900: The hobble skirt is popular with stylish women. It is tight
enough around the ankles to limit how far a woman could step, and like a
“hobble” for horses, made it hard for the female to run (or even walk) away.
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“Perhaps your objections are merely prejudices.”
In the book Her Infinite Variety by Brand Whitlock, set in Illinois, we get a sense of the thinking of this era, in regards to suffrage for women. At one point, the main female character, Miss Maria Greene, speaks to Senator Vernon, a state lawmaker, about a resolution in favor of female suffrage.
“But about this resolution, Senator
Vernon; I must not take up too much of your time. If you will give me your
objections to it perhaps I may be able to explain them away. We should very
much like to have your support.”
Vernon scarcely knew what to reply;
such objections as he might have found at other times – the old masculine
objections to women’s voting and meddling in politics – had all disappeared at
the site of this remarkable young woman who wished to vote herself; he could
not think of one of them, try as he would. His eyes were on the rose [which she
has given him].
“Perhaps your objections are merely
prejudices,” she ventured boldly, in her eyes a latent twinkle that disturbed
him.
“I confess, Miss Greene,” he began,
trying to get back something of his senatorial dignity, such as state
senatorial dignity is, “that I have not devoted much thought to the subject; I
am indeed rather ashamed to acknowledge that I did not even know the amendment
was coming up to-day, until I was – ah – so delightfully reminded by your rose.
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“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.”
Former President Grover Cleveland
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July 26, 1915: The
blogger’s mother is born. The world she enters is a place where women were
still denied the right to vote. Legally, in most states, a wife’s services also
belonged to her spouse, so a husband controlled her paycheck. In one famous
case a St. Louis woman, long separated from her husband, lost her leg in an
industrial accident. She sued the company for $10,000, only to have her
long-lost man reappear, agree to settle with her employer for $300, and
disappear with the cash.
In some states it was still legal for the husband to grant custody of the children in his will to whomever he chose.
At the time only 1 in 5 workers was female.
Only 1 in 25 medical school graduates was a woman, a figure that would remain virtually unchanged from 1905 until 1965.
There were still almost no female lawyers, judges, or
elected officials.
The dumbest man in history.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I used to point out
to students that my mother was in kindergarten by the time women won the right
to vote in the United States. I liked to point out that, “The
dumbest man in history – the dumbest – had more rights than all the females
ever born, until recently.”
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March 26, 1920: This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, is published. At a time when polite society believed a woman who allowed a man to kiss her must then be engaged, this line shocked readers.
Amory Blaine’s girlfriend
Rosalind Connage tells him, “I’ve kissed dozens of men, I suppose I’ll kiss
dozens more.”
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1927: Martha Lavell writes in her diary:
July 7. I’d give anything if I
could wear trousers. It’s perfectly terrible to have to sit with one’s knees
together for fear someone might see up, and to be in constant danger of having
one’s skirt blow up to one’s waist. Darn. Why can’t we women be treated
the same as men?
February 20. One thing which
annoys me greatly is the fact that our Child Training class is made up entirely
of women. Why is it that men aren’t interested in children? If I ever choose a
husband it will be one who’s vitally interested. It is the thing to which I
look forward most, I cannot imagine living without children.
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Shocking styles for women in the 20s. |
In the Victorian Age, women of an earlier generation were not expected even to mention their “legs” (one would politely talk of one’s “limbs,” instead), let alone reveal them.
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The 1920s: New styles shocked. The flappers (see below), showed too much leg, cut their hair too short, sometimes smoked, sometimes cursed, and even seemed to know about...sex! |
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The flapper style also include makeup! This picture and the one above are not in the author's collection. |
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Clothing for women
“shrank.” One estimate in 1928 was that it took 19 ¼ yards to dress a woman in
1913; now it took 7.
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1934: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers star in the movie The Gay Divorcée, a smash success. In one scene, a character explains, “Marriage is a weakness of men that women take advantage of.”
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1944:In the novel Wickford Point by John P. Marquand, Cousin Clothilde explains
the role she believes she has in life. Young ladies today might have an
interesting reaction. Her younger, male cousin asks:
“Well, I wonder what you live for,” I
said.
Curiously, my remark did not disturb
her in the least.
“Now, that’s easy to answer,” Cousin Clothilda said. “I live for Archie [her husband] and the children and for other people, dear. I don’t do it very well. I’m a very careless manager, because no one could ever teach me to add or subtract in school. Nearly all my teachers were very disagreeable people, but I try all the time to make Archie and the children and other people happy. That’s what I live for, dear and I think that’s what every woman wants to live for. You would understand if you were a woman. I suppose it may be different with men.”
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Rosie the Riveter helped win World War II, freeing men to fight. |
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Female pilots could ferry planes around, as needed, during World War II. The U.S. Air Force did not allow them to fly in combat until 1993. Neither this picture, nor the one directly above are in the author's collection. |
1946: With the war finally ended, Fannie Hurst, an early feminist who had managed to believe that a bright dawn for women was coming, can now only complain to audiences: “A sleeping sickness is spreading among the women of the land…They are regressing into…that thing known as The Home.”
The “Baby Boom” commences as veterans return home to start families. In 1946, the U.S. registered 3.47 million births.
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How to appeal to men.
1951: Arlene Dahl’s column, “Let’s Be Beautiful,” begins running in the Chicago Tribune. The former model and aspiring actress offers tips to women on how to appeal to men. In her own acting career, her beauty proved critical, as it did for many women of that era. “Arlene Dahl is displayed to wonderous advantage,” said one critic of the movie “Diamond Queen.” Another critic, in 1959, would note that she was “considered one of the world’s loveliest gals.”
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Advertisement found online; not in author's collection. |
Charles L. Mee is 14, in 1953, when
he contracts a serious case of polio which leaves him unable to walk.
Here, I focus on some of his comments
regarding the place of girls and women in that world. If I were still teaching,
I’d use this section, with words in bold explained for students:
My mother’s entire life was
taken up with her family. She had no
other life and, I think, wanted no other life.
Her own mother had been a woman who might have run a country—and had run
a large farm. Her sister had gone to New
York to make a dazzling career in business, and in photographs of her in the
1920s when she was herself in her twenties, she looks like a hot young woman, a
flapper, fully capable of a
glamorous and independent life in New York or Paris. But she came to marriage and family as her calling and gave herself up to her
family completely—to a fault I would say; vanished into her family, I would
say.
All of her children wished she
would be more assertive, live her life. But I think she did; her life was giving
herself to her family, to the continuing life of civilization itself…She
practiced the virtues of civilization:
good listening, careful and considerate speech, generosity, compassion,
supportiveness, honesty, warmth. She
took these as her vocation and hoped
her family would go out whole into the world to practice her example.”
Flapper: young woman of the period; known for wearing makeup and “short” skirts, smoking, drinking, talking about sex, and wanting to vote (all considered shocking).
Calling: mission, purpose in life; an inwardly felt call or summons (as to a doctor to help the poor).
Assertive: tending to assert oneself; sure and confident, forceful in stating own wishes.
Vocation: a strong feeling of fitness for a particular career or occupation (in religion: a divine call); a person’s employment, requiring dedication.
Source: Charles L. Mee:
A Nearly Normal Life
Mee also quotes from his yearbook. A certain girl has listed her goals in life:
Yvonne likes Ray,
football, Ray, basketball, Ray, Lincolns [an expensive car], Ray, track, Ray,
cheering, Ray, food, Ray, music, and Ray.
“Tenderly” is her favorite song.
To graduate, earn a mint, and have thirteen kids (twelve boys and one
girl—a football team, one sub, and a cheerleader) is her aim in life.
Finally, Mee describes what girls learned from their home economics textbook:
1. Have dinner ready: Plan ahead, even the night
before, to have a delicious meal – on time. This is a way of letting him know
that you have been thinking about him, and are concerned about his needs. Most
men are hungry when they come home and the prospects of a good meal are part of
the warm welcome needed.
2. Prepare yourself: Take
15 minutes to rest so you will be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your
makeup, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a
lot of work-weary people. Be a little gay [happy] and a little more
interesting. His boring day may need a lift.
3. Clear away the
clutter: Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your
husband arrives, gathering up school books, toys, papers, etc. Then run a dust
cloth over the tables. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest
and order, and it will give you a lift, too.
4. Prepare the children:
Take a few minutes to wash the children’s hands and faces if they are small,
comb their hair, and if necessary, change their clothes. They are little
treasures and he would like to see them playing the part.
5. Minimize the noise: At
the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dish-washer or
vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Be happy to see him. Greet
him with a warm smile and be glad to see him.
6. Some Don’ts: Don’t
greet him with problems or complaints. Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner.
Count this as minor compared with what he might have gone through that day.
7. Make him comfortable:
Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the
bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer
to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soft, soothing and pleasant voice. Allow
him to relax and unwind.
8. Listen to him: You may
have a dozen things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time.
Let him talk first.
9. Make the evening his.
Never complain if he does not take you out to dinner or to other places of
entertainment; instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure, his
need to be home and relax.
10. The goal: Try to make
your home a place of peace and order where your husband can relax.
Wyndham Robertson, who goes on to a career writing for Fortune magazine, remembers what it used to be like looking for a job in New York City, in 1958, when newspaper ads were divided: “Help Wanted – Male,” and “Help Wanted – Female.”
Before classified ads
went unisex, women had no established path to high-level jobs. I went job
hunting in New York with some classmates from the all-female Hollins College in
1958, a decade before The Times made the
change. Never in our dreams did we envision getting jobs as promising as those
of the boys we knew, even though — I will just say it — we were smarter than
most of them and harder working.
It did not even seem odd
to us that practically all of the good entry-level jobs were exclusively for
men. Those with college degrees were mostly going into training programs at
financial institutions or marketing companies, or in industry, where they would
learn the ropes and have their talents assessed and encouraged as they moved
along.
We women were sorting
through the “Help Wanted — Female” section, poring over ads from places seeking
a “Gal Friday.” The need for such low-paid workers — women who could write a
coherent phone message and deliver coffee without spilling — seemed insatiable.
Secretarial positions were among the better-paid work, and it was not unusual,
especially in publishing, for a bright woman who started as a secretary to
break out and rise up; some great editors took that route. Such exceptions do
not change the fact that in 1958, almost all of the jobs open to women were
dead ends.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: It might be possible, if you are teaching the modern portion of U.S. history to use scenes from the movie, The Best of Everything.
It’s a story about three young women, Caroline Bender, a recent Radcliffe grad, April Morrison, a naïve, innocent girl who grew up in Colorado, and Gregg Adams, a glamourous, aspiring actress, living in New York City. To say it doesn’t hold up well today is a huge understatement. Watching it, I found myself often gritting my teeth. Mr. Shalimar, the editor-in-chief at Fabian Publishing Company, where the three women work, can’t let an attractive secretary pass by without a pinch or a leer. One night he asks April to work late, taking dictation, and forces a kiss upon her. At an office party, he corners another secretary, Barbara Lamont, who has been married and divorced, and tries to force himself upon her, until she screams, and he is led away drunk.
As he leaves the
scene he scoffs, saying Lamont “knows what all this is about,” apparently
because she’s no virgin.
Even Amanda Farrow, a middle-aged, unmarried, and jaded editor at Fabian asks Shalimar in one scene – after she resigns her post and then returns – “Are you still pinching all the girls?”
Farrow seems to serve as a cautionary tale in the film, having put her career first, and marriage and having a family a distant second. She does quit at one point and tries to start a new life with a man who had asked her fifteen years before to marry him. He’s now a widower with two kids. Her attempt fails and she returns to Fabian and reclaims her old position. Bender, who has advanced, welcomes her back. Farrow says she tried to make a new life, but found she had “nothing to give.”
What the women in this movie all want, in the end, is to find love, which is, as the song at the end of the movie makes clear, “the best of everything.”
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Cheerleaders: Revere High School Bath, Ohio, 1967 |
April 19, 1967: For women, and for young women, too, life was still circumscribed. Revere had no interscholastic sports teams for girls. Female students still had to wear dresses or skirts to school. No pants were allowed.
On this day, however, Katherine Switzer made history by running the Boston Marathon, the first woman ever to do so. She and her coach checked the rule book beforehand to see if women were allowed; there was nothing about females being barred. It was simply assumed they couldn’t run that far. I think she signed up, using a first initial and last name, but need to check.
Around the two-mile mark, a race official realized a woman was on the course and tried to eject her from the field. Only a body block by her boyfriend allowed her to evade his reach and keep going. She remembers crying, and being afraid, after the official grabbed her by the sweatshirt and tried to rip off her racing bib (#261). But the other runners around her supported her the rest of the way.
Switzer finished proudly, and remembered later, “I started the Boston Marathon as a young girl, and came out the other end a grown woman.” Her interview with the BBC is quite interesting.
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1970: Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics is published. In her obituary, the NYT (9-8-17) says her work ignited “a Copernican revolution in the understanding of gender rules.” Previously, she had been at work on a doctoral thesis and teaching at Barnard College; but she was fired for helping organize a student protest in 1968. One advisor reviewing her thesis compared the experience to “sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker.” She completely discounted Freud’s theory of “penis envy,” and mocked Norman Mailer and others who set out to guard masculinity. “Precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side,” she called it. Time, reviewing her book, called Millett “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.”
In her view, many women suffered from “interior colonization.”
“It is interesting,” she elaborated, “that many women do not recognize
themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the
totality of their conditioning.”
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1971: Lucinda Franks is the first woman ever to win the first Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for a story on the Weather Underground. She has a distinguished career, exposing the dangers of red dye No. 2 in 1974, interviewing Hillary Clinton in 1999, who tells of her “enormous anger, enormous pain,” regarding Bill’s sexual escapades involving Monica Lewinski.
In her obituary, in 2021, The New York Times explains:
When
Ms. Franks began her career, in the late 1960s, most women in the news business
still had trouble getting serious assignments. Her first job with U.P.I., in
London, was fetching coffee.
After digging up unusual feature articles for the news agency on her own time, she became the London bureau’s first female reporter — and was assigned to cover beauty pageants.
1971:
Christine Beshar becomes the first woman ever to make law partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. In 1989 she began pushing for the firm to open its own day-care center, after her sitter for her young son failed to show up. “I can feel it in my gut still,” she later said. “What do you do when profession and family clashes?” The idea was voted on by the partners, with only one dissent out of more than sixty.
In an interview in 1988 she said, “I have thought a lot about
how I’d counsel my daughters if they said they wanted to take time off with
their children and be a wife and mother exclusively. And my answer is that I
feel very strongly that women should take time off when babies are little. It’s
become possible to do that now.”
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January 1,1972: Phyllis Schlafly, founder of a
group called STOP ERA, adapted the following essay into this form, to be presented as a speech, opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. The emphasis added is
mine:
Of all the classes of people who
ever lived, the American woman is the most privileged. We have the most
rights and rewards, and the fewest duties. Our unique status is the result
of a fortunate combination of circumstances.
1). We have the immense good
fortune to live in a civilization which respects the family as the basic
unit of society. This respect is part and parcel of our laws and our
customs. It is based on the fact of life - which no legislation or agitation can erase –
that women have babies and men don’t.
If you don’t like this
fundamental difference, you will have to take up your complaint with God
because He created us this way. The fact that women, not men, have babies
is not the fault of selfish and domineering men, or of the establishment, or of
any clique of conspirators who want to oppress women. It’s simply the way God
made us.
Our Judeo-Christian civilization has developed the law and custom that, since women must bear the physical consequences of the sex act, men must be required to bear the other consequences and pay in other ways. These laws and customs decree that a man must carry his share by physical protection and financial support of his children and of the woman who bears his children, and also by a code of behavior which benefits and protects both the woman and the children.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: Schlafly’s full speech is available, and I
would think might interest students. (I only briefly taught the modern part of
American history, so I have never tried out this piece in a classroom.)
*
June 23, 1972: The Equal Rights in Education Act is signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon. That act, under Title IX, forbid discrimination based on sex in any educational program or activity that received federal funding.
The drafting of this particular piece of the Education Act was actually the work of two women, members of the U.S. House of Representatives. One was Rep. Edith Green, of Oregon, the other, Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii, both women of color. Mink, herself, had been denied admission to dozens of medical schools because she was a woman. Having seen the furor erupt, regarding efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the two lawmakers took a low-key approach to their efforts to change history.
Title IX is only 37 words long. It reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The reach of IX was so unclear that the president did not even
mention it at signing. Once it passed, however, the question of enforcement led
to a torrent of criticism. Did this act mean girls could sign up for middle
school wrestling teams? If colleges had to grant equal opportunity in sports,
for example, shouldn’t female athletes have as many scholarships as males? If a
school paid the girls’ track coach, with the same years of experience, less
money than the boys’ track coach, would that be fair? In 1977, a group of Yale
women, filed a lawsuit, demanding that the school establish a grievance
procedure, designed to help protect females on campus from sexual assault and harassment.
In years to come, Title IX led to victories, large and small, for girls and women. Fifty years later, at the high school level, 3,000,000 more girls were running track, shooting baskets, or scoring goals for their schools’ teams than had been true in 1972. That year, only 15% of college athletes were women. Half a century later, that number had risen to 44%. And the Yale women won their lawsuit, as well.
No one seemed to realize what an impact it might have on girls and women interested in playing sports. One of the first to push for change under Title IX, was Christine Grant, an athletic director at the University of Iowa. Born in Scotland, where she survived German bombing raids during World War II, before finding work, first in Canada and then the United States, Grant would later say that after only the Nineteenth Amendment, Title IX was “the most important piece of federal legislation that was passed in the 20th century for women in this nation.”
The impact can be measured in many ways – but the clearest, in sports – relates to raw numbers. In 1971-1972, only 294,015 girls were playing high school sports. By 2022, that number had grown to 3,402,733.
The New York Times explains how Grant, who had arrived at the university in 1968, had her first wake-up call to the inequality in sports.
In 1969,
in a story Grant frequently recalled, a field house on Iowa’s campus was to be
built with fees paid by male and female students. But architectural plans
excluded locker rooms and bathrooms for women, who were not to be allowed into
the building. She said she was told that women lacked interest in sports.
“And I’m sure that was the trigger that made me a feminist,”
Grant told Ellyn Bartges in 2009 in an interview for the Oral History Project at
the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “I mean, I just — that blew me away.”
Grant laughed and continued: “I’m thinking, ‘The greatest
democracy in the world, that’s what the U.S. always claims to be. Well, it’s
only for a minority of the population because women are the majority here.’ So
that was the start of a real understanding of how this world works.”
Change was coming, however, and in 1973, Grant was named athletic director for women’s sports at Iowa, at a salary of $14,000. She held her job until 2000, and during that time saw the budget for women’s sports increase from $3,000 to $7 million. On February 3, 1985, in part to win greater attention for women’s athletics, Grant helped organize an effort to set a record for the largest attendance ever at a women’s basketball game. Iowa’s Carver-Hawkeye Arena normally sat 15,500.
This time, 22,157 showed up to watch. Grant later received a letter of reprimand from the fire marshal, but C. Vivian Springer, the coach of Iowa’s women’s team at the time, recalled tears streaming down her face at the size of the crowd. On another occasion, when a women’s coach asked Grant, by that time retired, if she should ask the university for a raise, the former athletic director made it clear that she should. “Lisa, you’re not fighting for yourself,” Grant explained, “you’re fighting for your daughters and all the women that come behind you.”
Across the nation, at the time Title IX took effect, women’s sports in college received only 2% of the budgeted funds. Scholarships were almost unheard of for female athletes. Full compliance was mandated only in 1978, and schools and other institutions scrambled to make up huge gaps.
In 1972, only 90 female Olympians participated for the United States, out of 428 team members. By 2016 one in every five girls in the U.S. played sports; prior to Title IX the number had been 1 in 27. At the Olympics that year, 292 American women took part, vs. 263 men.
“Human hippos start handing out the trays.”
Airlines
often exploited the looks of their stewardesses as a marketing strategy. One of
the most egregious examples was a National Airlines ad campaign that featured a
young stewardess and a not so subtle tagline: “I’m Cheryl. Fly Me.” Many
airlines limited how much stewardesses could weigh, and some women took diet
pills or starved themselves to avoid losing their jobs. “If there was any
suspicion that you didn’t look exactly the way the appearance supervisor
thought you should look, she would have you hop on the scale in front of
everybody,” Tucker said. “If you were ten pounds over what your maximum was,
they would remove you from your flight.”
In 1972,
Sandie Hendrix, a stewardess at United, was fired after weighing in at a
hundred and twenty-seven pounds. (Hendrix was five feet two, and the limit for
her height was a hundred and eighteen pounds.) Her story made the national
news, but not everyone was on her side: one nationally syndicated columnist,
writing about the possible end of the airlines’ weight rules, bemoaned a future
in which “human hippos start handing out the trays.”
 |
Advertisement in protest, related to how women were hired : 1973. Scanned by author. |
More than 261,000 women served in the military during the
Vietnam era, and over 7,500 served in Vietnam itself. These included 5,000 Army
women, 2,000 Air Force women, 500 Navy women and 27 female Marines. Eight
military women – seven army nurses and one Air Force nurse – died in Vietnam,
including one (Army Lieutenant Sharon A. Lane) who was killed in action.
*
1975: People magazine runs a story on Marabel Morgan, author of The Total Woman. That story reads in part:
While
the women’s liberation movement has been campaigning to take the role playing
out of marriage, a 37-year-old Florida mother of two, Marabel Morgan, has built
a thriving business on the credo: “Let your husband be your master
[emphasis added unless otherwise noted].” Her book, The Total Woman,
last year’s nonfiction best-seller, sold more than 500,000 hardback copies, and
the paperback rights have been bought for $600,000.
Marabel’s
success at merchandising her step-by-step techniques for connubial bliss has
made her a kind of Xaviera Hollander [a former call girl and author of The
Happy Hooker: My Own Story] of happy housewives.
As a
crusading marital troubleshooter, the first failing marriage Marabel rescued
was her own. After six-and-a-half years it had slipped into a joyless routine
in which “pass the salt” was extended conversation. “If Marabel hadn’t been the
one to change,” insists lawyer-husband Charlie, “we would probably be among the
ranks of the divorced.”
What
triggered Marabel’s transformation from nagging hausfrau to Total Woman was a
dinner-table argument over plans for the next evening. “From now on,” decreed
Charlie icily, “when I plan for us to go somewhere, I will tell you 20
minutes ahead of time, you can get ready, and we’ll do without all this
arguing!” Marabel quickly realized that “at the rate we were going, 10 years
from now we would hate each other!”
She
decided to try to save the marriage. After a cram reading course in
self-improvement (like Dale Carnegie and marriage manuals), she began to
“experiment” with her role as wife. One evening she greeted conservative
Charlie at the door in pink baby-doll pajamas and white go-go boots. He
“dropped his briefcase on the doorstep and chased me around the dining-room
table,” she confides to readers of her book.
Recalling
her pre-TW days, Marabel confesses, “I was a shrew. Charlie was looking for
me to make him happy when he came home, and I began to do it. Within one
week he began to talk. It took about eight months for us to really communicate
the way we used to before we were married.”
*
1978: Marilyn Loden, 31, is working in human resources for the
New York Telephone Company, when she is asked to join a panel at a feminist conference in Manhattan. After listening to others describe the kinds of
barriers they ran into at work, she decided to speak up. Many of the
professional women were focused on their own lack of confidence, and their own
self-deprecation.
Loden remembered thinking “that there was an invisible barrier to advancement that people didn’t recognize.
She called it a “glass ceiling.”
At her own
company, Ms. Loden recalled male peers telling her to “smile more” in meetings,
while other male co-workers averred that the advancement of female middle
managers was “degrading those positions.” And when a promotion she felt she had
earned went to a man, despite her better performance record, she was told that
it was because “he was a ‘family man,’” she told the BBC in 2017 — “that he was the main breadwinner and
so needed the money more.”
*
1978: The Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders are becoming a phenomenon. The team kicks off its season with a TV special, The 36 Most Beautiful Girls in Texas. As The New York Times explained, their uniforms included “white hot pants, short blue vests, exposed midriffs and white vinyl go-go boots.”
The women provided football fans “a
little sex with their violence.” (That last part is not from the Times;
it’s a quote.) (NYT: 10-1-16)
*
1985: The U.S. Soccer Federation sends a letter to 17 promising female soccer players and floats the idea of sending a team to a women’s tournament in Italy, known as the “little World Cup.” Michelle Akers, described as “a hard-assed midfielder” who had played in college, was one recipient.
Akers remembers, “At first I had no idea what the national team was, but I said yes right away because I was going to be playing soccer somewhere with a lot of people and thought it would be great fun.” Title IX, passed only thirteen years before, had sparked the growth of women’s high school and college sports; and soccer was catching on with girls. (This is all from “A Team is Born” by Grant Wahl in SI, June 3-10, 2019.)
The American women played four games in that tournament, lost three and tied one. They were wholly unprepared for the level of intensity. It was like the European teams “were playing against little kids in a way,” Akers says. The Americans weren’t used to being held by the shirt or grabbed in the crotch and fouled. “We got our asses kicked,” Akers recalls. Carin Jennings, on that first team, remembered in high school that there was still a stigma against female athletes. “And every day I’d go to school, someone would ask me about sports, and I’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t play sports.’ I denied it all the way through high school because it wasn’t the cool thing to do.”
1995: Paula Newby-Fraser, with a huge lead, begins to reel and
stagger before collapsing a half-mile from the finish line at the Kona Ironman
World Championship. She can be heard saying she thinks she might die, but soon
rises to walk across the line in fourth place. She won the women’s division in
the race eight times during her career, proving women could do almost anything
men could do, and more than most men could dream. In 1988 she took eleventh
place, overall, the highest finish for a female ever. Involved: 2.4 mile swim,
112 mile bicycle leg, 26.2 mile marathon to finish.
WOMEN AND THE DRAFT: I found that my students had almost no idea how the draft worked. During the Civil War names were placed in a large drum and pulled out by a blindfolded individual. During the Vietnam War, a lottery set the draft by picking days of the year at random. If the first date selected was January 11, then every male, age 18, born on that date eighteen years before, would be first drafted.
This blogger’s number was 269, so he would have been safe, had he not already joined the Marines. His younger brother’s number was 356 the next year. Sometimes young man, for example, in fraternities, gathered for a draft “party,” involving lots of beer and alcohol. The blogger’s friend Ray remembers making fun of Don, a mutual friend, when his number came up #8. Ray did not have long to celebrate, because his birthdate was #13.
Another friend of the blogger evaded service by convincing his draft board he was gay, then a disqualification for serving.
*
February
8, 2018: Rolling Stone quotes Margo
Price, the country singer: “Women are not going to put up with shit anymore, and it’s amazing.”
*
May 11, 2018: The New York Times comments on the “Incel” Movement (“Incels Aren’t Alone in Online Harvesting of Men’s Sense of Loss”). The term comes from men who describe themselves as “involunatarily celibate.” The Times writes: “The incel movement tell its adherents that society’s rules are engineered to unfairly deprive them of sex. That worldview lets them see themselves as both victims, made lonely by a vast conspiracy, and as superior, for their unique understanding of the truth.”
Sometimes one brand of hate overlaps with another. On Incel.me, debate focuses on uniting the incel movement with the alt-right, and argues that Jews are to blame for the incels’ oppression. “On one thread, users fantasized that if they were dictators, they would enslave women, but also “gas the Jews.”
*
June 3, 2018: A study, stretching across 34 countries, including the U.S., Japan, Sweden and Greece, finds that unmarried people are 42% more prone to cardiovascular disease, 16% more likely to have coronary heart disease and a 55% greater chance of death from strokes.
“The
study suggests that both men and women benefit from marriage,” the item in The New York Times finally notes.
*
Fall: “MJ” Hegar is running for a seat in
Congress from Texas 31st. She was a pilot in the Air Force and did
three tours in Afghanistan. When she was shot down in 2009, she held off
Taliban attackers and was awarded a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying
Cross with Valor, making one of only a few women ever to win the award. Having
had such a close brush with death, she says, “You cannot come out of a
situation like that and then waste your life. I gotta pay for that somehow.”
*
January 16, 2019: Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, 35, and three other Americans are killed in a suicide bombing at a restaurant in Mabij, Syria.
The New York Times tells her story in an article headlined: “Title: Cryptologic Technician. Occupation: Warrior.” Kent was no desk jockey, but constantly part of dangerous missions, her job to gather and assess intelligence gathered in multiple ways.
As the Times puts it, “she spent much of her professional life wearing body armor and toting an M4 rifle, a Sig Sauer pistol strapped to her thigh, on operations with Navy SEALs and other elite forces.”
In the years since 9/11, reporters note, there has been
a profound shift in attitudes
toward women in combat roles. Since 2016, combat jobs have been open to female
service members, and they have been permitted to try out for Special Operations
units. More than a dozen have completed the Army’s Ranger school, one of
the most challenging in the military. Some have graduated from infantry officer
courses, and even command combat units. And in November, a woman completed the Army’s grueling Special
Forces Assessment and Selection course, the initial step to becoming a Green
Beret.
“In many ways, she did way more than any of us who have a funny green hat,” her husband, Joe Kent, a member of the Green Berets, himself, said. “Her job was to go out and blend her knowledge of cryptology and sigint and humint to help the task force find the right guys to paint the ‘X’ on for a strike or a raid.”
“Cryptology,”
the Times explained, “is code breaking; sigint is signals intelligence,
like intercepting and interpreting phone calls and other communications; humint
is human intelligence, the art of persuading people, against their instincts,
to provide information.”
*
February 23, 2019: U.S. District Court Judge Gray Miller rules that the “males only” draft is unconstitutional. He bases his decision on the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment. In his ruling, Judge Miller notes that the Pentagon lifted restrictions on women in combat in 2015. “If there was ever a time to discuss ‘the place of women in the Armed Services,’ that time has passed,” he says.
*
November 30, 2019: A report from the National Center for Health Statistics notes that the fertility rate for the United States fell to its lowest level ever in 2018. For every 1,000 women of child-bearing age, there were 59.1 births. Buried in the numbers, there is one positive trend, with births to teen mothers down 70% since 1991. The decline among women in their 20’s and early 30’s is less positive.
At current rates (1.73 children per woman), and barring robust
immigration, the U.S. will soon begin to experience negative population growth.
2020: NASA’s graduating class of astronauts includes five women, out of eleven: Kayla Barron, Zena Cardman, Jasmine Moghbeli (an Iranian-American immigrant), Loral O’Hara and Jessica Watkins. “They are the pioneers of the final frontier whose work will help fortify America’s leadership in space for generations to come,” Senator Ted Cruz tells the audience for their graduation.
“I am excited for the opportunities ahead of them,” he added, “including landing the first woman ever on the surface of the Moon, and having the first boots to step on Mars.”
*
June 11, 2020: Capt. Emily “Banzai” Thompson makes history as the first female to fly a combat sortie in an F-35 fighter jet. Her unit is based in the United Arab Emirates; but the Air Force is mum about where she flew her mission or exactly when.
Asked about it, Thompson herself was naturally excited. “I think it’s a bright future,” for female pilots, she said. “There is a number of us already in the F-35 and I think the number is just going to continue to grow. It’s a very supportive community, it’s very open, I think the opportunity for women to really excel in the F-35 is definitely there.”
Asked if she had advice for girls who might want to fly jets someday (rather than pretend Barbie and Ken were kissing during a trip to the beach), she replied, “Know there’s a lot of supportive people out there. Just stay positive, work hard, and you can achieve whatever you set your mind out to do, you can get it done.”
*
May 6, 2021: The “sell-by” date for women is mentioned in The New York Times, in a story about Billie Eilish, the popular 19-year-old singer. That date still comes for women far earlier than for men.
Not much change from the 1600s when you could refer to an unmarried woman in her early twenties as “a stale old maid.”
*
July 2021: Young women, aged 18, might soon be required to register for the draft, just like their boyfriends, brothers, and classmates of the same age. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge in June 2021 to the “males-only” requirement that individuals sign up for the draft. Legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate in July 2021 would have removed the word “male” from existing draft law, and the proposal was approved by the Senate Armed Forces Committee.
Sen. Josh Hawley, (R-Mo.) objected, as did others. Hawley tweeted:
American women have heroically served in and alongside our fighting forces since our nation’s founding - It’s one thing to allow American women to choose this service, but it’s quite another to force it upon our daughters, sisters, and wives. Missourians feel strongly that compelling women to fight our wars is wrong and so do I.
Since 2013, all positions in the U.S. military have been open to women, including service in combat units.
Some say it’s time to make them eligible for the draft. The committee voted 23-2 in favor of the change.
