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I guess that means that no unmarried woman could get the procedure, with no one to co-sign!
I was able to get my tubes tied as a young single woman in the 80, but even I was surprised by the hoops women have to jump through to get that procedure done even today:
I'm not putting down Catholics here, but people need to be aware of these things if they go to a Catholic owned hospital. For the record, both of our local hospitals are now under the control of a Catholic organization, but because of the many people worried and asking about secular services, they have promised they would continue to give the same care as they always have. Let's hope they stick to that.
[quote=charlygal;51265563] The OP specified the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, which make some of the statements preposterous. It was no paradise of equality for women, but the list is off the walls in its generalizations about those decades.
Women couldn't work and couldn't control their financial lives.
If women hadn't been able to work in those decades my town would have had to close down, not to mention NYC in the Sixties.
Women worked outside of the home by the millions, not as execs, but they staffed the retail stores and worked in factories. In my small town in a factory which manufactured industrial ceramic insulators a woman was a shift boss over an all male unit and had been since WWII. In the early Sixties in a dessert mfg plant, a woman was in charge of one of the three humungous presses that printed and cut the cardboard package containers, and my recollection is that the work staff was almost fifty-fifty, with women having the edge.
I worked with women in the Fifties and Sixties in stores and factories. There were plenty of them in both places. In the Sixties in NYC women worked everywhere I ever worked.....though not very many at the NY Times.
My mother worked in the Fifties when I was in high school, two of her married sisters worked in businesses from the 1930s on - one was an exec secy, another ran a printing shop and two rooming houses in rundown neighborhoods with her husband (they lived in one), and the other sister was the wretched wife of a farmer, who did chores on a dairy farm and had to prepare the meals (frequently from scratch), clean the house, etc. as well, and raise three kids. P.S. - the kids were trained to do farm chores from primary school on. The farm kids I went to school with worked their butts off by and large from a very early age.
No birth control available and had to produce possibly unwanted children.
Ever hear of condoms. I worked in a drug store, and married women came in and bought condoms...presumably for intercourse with their husbands. Married and single men bought condoms, it was country area but they couldn't all have have been using them when bangin' sheep. Roman Catholic women supposedly were oppressed by their church's rules again birth control. But in my town, only the first generation immigrant R.C. women had large families, the following generations dropped right down the the small families that Protestant and Jewish women had. I think it is obvious they wanted no part (husband or wife) of eight to ten kids.
Men had the legal right to rape their wives.
You got one right. He could have his "piece" whenever he wanted, whether or not.
Women were expected to be seen and not heard.
Maybe in your neck of the hills, but working class women talked plenty, spoke up and talked back. Perhaps the professional gentry were different.
Women are still seen as biologically inferior to men.
Yup....ironic when I think of the woman bossing men out in the manufacturing floor of that factory I spoke of...or honchoing that huge press and cutter, I wonder how those guys rationalized those women's roles.
Women didn't have the right to vote.
We're talking the U.S., check your books.
The male dominated medical field didn't believe menstrual cramps were real and didn't understand most "female" problems. They thought women were crazy when they complained.
My mother's doctor did - surely he wasn't alone, it was men outside the medical profession who minimized them. On the other hand, the drug store I worked in stocked over the counter medications for menstrual discomfort. So, it certainly paid some men to believe in it.
It was acceptable for a man to keep his woman in line by beating her.
Again, maybe up in your hills but not in my small town! He would lose most of his male friends, and the neighbors would call the cops, or as happened in my neighborhood in the Forties, go over and knock on the door. There was no male conspiracy to see women bludgeoned by other men.
The history of women and rape is appalling. Google Recy Taylor. Agreed, and so is war, and I see no likelihood that men are going to stop doing either.
Women couldn't have their own bank accounts or buy real estate without a man.
My aunt had no husband, no father, no brother...I wonder if male bosses were in a position to authorize for such women as she sure had a bank account when she lived with us.
Need more?
I think you need to realize, because you sure sound like you wore a blindfold in these decades, that states differed in their laws and local law enforcement varied a great deal, and differences in social class, ethnicity, religion, etc. played major roles in training men and women. There was not one blanket evil machine at work, despite how neat that indictment reads. The reality of those decades was often far removed from it, without being any paradise of equal opportunities and rights.
Not to mention having to get the husband's signed permission for the procedure if the woman was married. Yet another way in which women were denied the responsibility for their own bodies.
I tried to get my tubes tied when I was 29. I had already had two kids and knew I didn't want more and I was having cruddy side effects from birth control pills, I thought it was up to me but I guessed wrong. My gynecologist spent 10 minutes lecturing me about what an awful idea it was and when she saw that she wasn't going to change my mind she said she would only schedule the procedure if I agreed to see a psychologist first.
I felt like a criminal and a crazy one at that when she finally got done with me, and I never asked about it again, I just kept taking BC pills.
Ever hear of condoms. I worked in a drug store, and married women came in and bought condoms...presumably for intercourse with their husbands. Married and single men bought condoms, it was country area but they couldn't all have have been bangin' sheep.
Maybe where you lived. But not everywhere. Here's part of a ruling that overturned the law against contraception in Connecticut:
Griswold v. Connecticut No. 496 Argued March 29-30, 1965 Decided June 7, 1965 381 U.S. 479 APPEAL FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF ERRORS OF CONNECTICUT
Appellants, the Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and its medical director, a licensed physician, were convicted as accessories for giving married persons information and medical advice on how to prevent conception and, following examination, prescribing a contraceptive device or material for the wife's use. A Connecticut statute makes it a crime for any person to use any drug or article to prevent conception. Appellants claimed that the accessory statute, as applied, violated the Fourteenth Amendment. An intermediate appellate court and the State's highest court affirmed the judgment.
Held: 1. Appellants have standing to assert the constitutional rights of the married people. Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U. S. 44, distinguished. P. 381 U. S. 481.
2. The Connecticut statute forbidding use of contraceptives violates the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Pp. 381 U. S. 481-486. 151 Conn. 544, 200 A.2d 479, reversed.
Low-income poor women have always worked- as domestics, taking in laundry or boarders, sex work. I believe Social Security specifically excluded domestic workers at its inception because of the many "undesirables" who worked as domestics.
I have said so before and again. Most people, men and women, have jobs, not Careers and advanced degrees and all. And increasingly, women are able to get and keep more areas of work/jobs/career than previously.
Never wanted to consider marriage as a job- to be in such a relationship in order to have food and a roof overhead. I always said I'd rather work on my feet than on my back. And yes, even in my advanced age, I'd like company, be it marriage or not, but don't want that company to determine my survival.
Griswold v. Connecticut No. 496 Argued March 29-30, 1965 Decided June 7, 1965 381 U.S. 479 APPEAL FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF ERRORS OF CONNECTICUT
Appellants, the Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and its medical director, a licensed physician, were convicted as accessories for giving married persons information and medical advice on how to prevent conception and, following examination, prescribing a contraceptive device or material for the wife's use. A Connecticut statute makes it a crime for any person to use any drug or article to prevent conception. Appellants claimed that the accessory statute, as applied, violated the Fourteenth Amendment. An intermediate appellate court and the State's highest court affirmed the judgment.
Held: 1. Appellants have standing to assert the constitutional rights of the married people. Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U. S. 44, distinguished. P. 381 U. S. 481.
2. The Connecticut statute forbidding use of contraceptives violates the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Pp. 381 U. S. 481-486. 151 Conn. 544, 200 A.2d 479, reversed.
Also, as had been stated in numerous posts so far, condoms did not give women control over their bodies because it required a man put it on. if your husband wanted more kids and you didn't, too bad. It wasn't until the pill that women truly had an effective way to decide for themselves whether and when they had children.
I say the same thing - if the good old days were so good, why didn't things stay that way? It was good for some, but not good for the majority.
My father's mother used to squelch her kids enthusiastic tales of growing up when she had had enough, by saying, "The good old days were never the good old days to those that lived them." And they would then remember the poverty she and her husband had lived in for much of their married life, and the debt she was left with in 1930 when she was widowed.
Thank you for making the same point I did when I made my posting. The posting I was responding erred in making a blanket list.
And my point, if you choose to re-read it, which I made several times was that there were variations in most of her points across the U.S. Indeed, it could depend upon where you lived and when in the span from the Forties through the Sixties....among other things.
Also, as had been stated in numerous posts so far, condoms did not give women control over their bodies because it required a man put it on. if your husband wanted more kids and you didn't, too bad. It wasn't until the pill that women truly had an effective way to decide for themselves whether and when they had children.
True.
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.
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.
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