What was it like being a young woman in the 70s?

[Lodestar]

The shift from natural fibers in clothing to polyester was absolutely jarring.


Hard rock and disco were also a discordant adjustment.


My personal life took the biggest leap of all. In the spring I was a free-wheeling, GI jacket and Levi-wearing college student and a blink later that fall I was a faculty wife at a small Midwest, conservative college.


I didn't realize it at the time but a lot of my male peers were coming home from Vietnam emotionally damaged and through the post-war haze of celebration many of us didn't know the struggles of what was to come of that.

[Scratch33]

The 70's was basically when all the hippies incorporated.

[southbound_295]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

Academia was open to women, at least, and the medical profession: women could be MD's, but the atmosphere could be hostile, depending. I had a friend, now passed, who went into architecture way back in the 60's. She served on the city planning commission and did a lot in her town with historic preservation. She never married, though. Maybe too brainy? And to plain, judging by photos of her from her youth.

Men wanted to feel superior in the brains department but the real turnoff was a female making good money.

[601halfdozen0theother]

I graduated from high school in 1975, so I was a teen in the early 70s and in my early 20s in the late 1970s. I graduated from college in 1980.

You know, the reality is that when you're living life things are just the way they are, so my memories are personal to my specific life rather than part of larger societal movements.

For one thing, it never occurred to me in 1975 that I couldn't be whatever I wanted to be. My sister, cousins and friends all became whatever they wanted to be in life. There was no expectation that you had to get married or were limited in the occupation you could have or what kind of education you could get. And I grew up in the Midwest, so it's not as though we lived in the middle of the cutting edge of social change. All of my friends' mothers worked, come to think of it, although my own mother was a housewife until she decided to go back to work when I was in high school. And we were all solidly middle class.

I think you'd have to go further back in time to the early 1960s to a time in which in most places women didn't have plenty of options.

The same thing is true about the sexual revolution. Those young women I knew who wanted to experiment did, those who didn't, didn't. It's not as though all of us were running around participating in "free love". I do think, though, that more of us knew about and discussed openly various methods of birth control than young women did in earlier decades.

The kinds of sexual harassment I encountered then aren't much different than the kinds I experience now. Men who are jerks will say and do nasty things, while decent men who were well raised won't. (And yes, older women do experience sexual harassment.)

The Vietnam war left a lot of scars. One of my teachers had a husband who was a disabled Vietnam veteran. I saw several protests locally. Television and movies portrayed the war as sad and bad and wrong. It is interesting that the concept that "war is bad" seems to have disappeared among young people - I think the young people of today don't think about it as much as we did because they've never been in danger of being drafted. My brother and the guys I knew were all eligible for the draft, but we were just slightly too young for any of my friends or family to be drafted.

Actually, I think the more dramatic decades in my life were the 1960s (girls couldn't wear pants to school in my area until 1968, and the hippies of the 60s were very dramatic and colorful on tv and in town) and the 1990s (the introduction of personal computers and the internet changed EVERYTHING at work, and later at home - we really had to adapt and evolve.)

So I guess I don't think the 1970s were all that exciting.

(Oh - all the polyester really was uncomfortable. Today I only wear natural fibers.)