Wade just meant that they were safe and legal. Men weren't stigmatized for fathering an out of wedlock child, but mothers of out of wedlock babies were ostracized, unable to find work or a place to live because they were 'fallen'. Single women couldn't even ask about contraceptives when they became available, and yet single women needed contraceptives as much as anyone. people forget how terrible and tragic things were before Roe v.

By 1970, more than 43 percent of women were in the workforce, and it was just the beginning.In 1969, elite all-male colleges like Princeton and Yale began admitting women students. Essentially, it banned discrimination on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or gender and paved way to file a lawsuit against discrimination in the workplace.Īs a result, more and more jobs became available to women. A year later, another dramatic change happened with the congress passing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Up until the 1960s, newspapers even had separate job listings for men and women, and the same job listing indicated a smaller wage for a woman worker.īut three years later, in 1963, congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which required employers to pay men and women the same wage for equivalent work. Most women worked in “pink collar” jobs as teachers, secretaries, and nurses. They made on average 60 percent less than men, had near to zero opportunity to advance, and were hardly represented in their professions. In 1960, almost 40 percent of American women were in the workforce. A Tumblr user has recently shared a somewhat shocking list of things that women in the 1960s weren’t legally allowed to do It does feel a little shocking, to say the least, and shows just how thankful we have to be to feminism and its brave fighters who turned this world around.

So this time, we will be looking into an illuminating thread by one Tumblr user who listed the things that women of the 1960s legally couldn’t do. Especially when the term is often misused or viewed with distrust and criticism these past decades. In 1949, when the French philosopher Simone De Beauvoir released her book “ The Second Sex,” it further fueled the feminist consciousness and paved the way to the more equal society we live in today.īut since there’s still a lot of room for improving the future of women’s and traditionally marginalized groups’ rights, it’s worth reflecting on the past. Hence, second-wave feminism marked a fight for a wide range of issues, from the workplace, de facto inequalities, family and sexuality, reproductive rights, and many more.

Tumblr quotes the 1975 somebody else