A friend of mine got his PhD in 1963 and his first (and, actually only) job was at a small college in Massachusetts. In one of his first days there, one of the older faculty members looked at my friends white shirt and tie but slacks and a sport jacket and said to him, “A gentleman’s pants match his coat.” My friend ignored him.
We moved to Quebec in 1968. Until just a year or two before we came, a woman could not sign a contract without her husband’s agreement. One the students told me that when his wife tried to buy some furniture on time, not only did they insist that he sign, but also there was a space on the contract for him to give permission for his wife to sign. Another thing was that a married woman was required to use her husband’s name formally (such as applying for a job). Soon after that it was forbidden for a woman to use her husband’s name. To the extent that a woman I know who, as it happened, had the same last name as her husband could not get paid because the computer was programmed to reject it. Finally she just changed the spelling of her maiden name.
Speaking of clothes (way upthread). in the late 60s/early 70s our youth group did a night out at a (wood floor) skating rink. Not wanting to skate, I was planning on hanging out at the side. I wasn’t allowed in, because I was wearing dungarees. They had “good clothes” for upstart troublemakers like me (I wasn’t) to change into. Years later I realized that dungarees == bad and they didn’t want that kind of crowd (seriously, was it a throwback to the 40s?), but I never wanted to do that again.
Remember when it first started being acceptable for women to wear pants in public and the zippers had to be ON THE SIDE for women’s trousers? Because a central fly was a feature of men’s pants.
Then there’s the whole thing with buttons on men’s and women’s shirts - not that the vast majority care if women wear men’s shirts these days, but the first couple of years I worked at my current store there was an elderly biddy who used to loudly complain to store management about our uniform shirts “forcing” women to wear men’s shirts with the buttons on the “wrong” side. Hello! It’s the 20-teens!
Or just making assumptions and misconstruing relationships. One of my college room-mates and I used to confuse the hell out of people. I’m straight, she’s lesbian, and no, we weren’t “doing” each other. We’d both date, we’d even bring our dates home, everyone got along.
It’s always possible that room-mates are just that - sharing a residence and not a sex life.
This just reminded me of something. Mrs Trep and I bought our first house in the mid-1980s. You had to sign a contract for gas* supply, of course (this is in the UK), and the contracts stated that, if the customer was a couple, the contract had to be completed by the man; if it was completed by the woman, she had to do it in the man’s name (ie, enter his details, not her own.) In the mid 1980s!
Incensed, we crammed both our details into the space provided. No objection was raised to this. We got our gas.
j
gas as in cas for heating and cooking, of course, not gasoline.
I thought this was a class thing as much as a gender thing (at least historically, and I’m posting from the UK). A man would dress himself, but a Lady would be dressed by a maid - therefore (assuming right handedness as well, I guess), the buttons were reversed for the convenience of the maid. Therefore a pretension of wealth or class or breeding.
Whatever, an absurd (and somewhat pernicious) anachronism.
Elvis Presley was born 1935. Everything I’ve seen says that he was a polite man and boy, and had black friends and contacts.
And I’ve seen on documentary a Blank man reporting that “He was very polite. My father loved him. He called my father Sir. I called my father Sir of course, but – no other White man, or boy, ever called my father Sir”
** Kzbre5m** mentioned dungarees being taboo in the wood-floored skating rinks. In my town, the rinks said it was because the rivets would scar the floor when the skater fell down. Blue jeans were associated with “hoodlums, juvenile delinquents,” too. That’s why our mothers didn’t want us to wear them.
This is STILL common in some states, because state laws give spouses a marital interest in the family home even if his/her name isn’t on the title. That means, for example, when I took out a second mortgage on the home I owned in my name long before my marriage, my spouse had to give consent to encumbering “our” interest. (That was in 2005.)
In my HS, before those dates, girls were allowed to take shop and boys Home ec, but they were assumed and strongly encouraged to take the “proper” class. We had one girl in woodshop, her dad had been a cabinet maker. Of course no boy would do Home Ec, since he’d be called 'gay".
Boys had to wear long pants, girls skirts, except on “bermuda days” when shorts could be worn- usually the girls wore pedal pusher pants or capris. My small clique wore dress pants, dress shirts and ties as a protest.
Nobody’s mentioned naked high-school swimming classes. We had six weeks of 5-day-a-week swimming class every semester, and only the boys had to swim naked (separate pools for boys/girls). If a kid had a doctor’s note to get out of swimming, he had to walk around the pool, naked, for the period. There’s a long thread somewhere about this.
People dressed to go to Disneyland. Not formal, the look was summer dresses or capris for the females, khaki pants and short sleeve dress shirts for males, tie optional, and hats, of course.
Yup. The girls had the old gym and mold-ridden pool from the 1920s, and the boys had the brand-spanking-new facilities. This was during the baby-boom years, when the new addition was built to accommodate the increased population. Lately, that new addition was removed, and the school has been restored to its original design. One gym and moldy pool for everyone.
My aged MIL was widowed in the mid 1960s in CT, leaving her as single Mom to two pre-teens. She ended up moving to AZ. Not so amazing in itself. The “why” is boggling though.
In 1965 in CT a grown woman could not sign a lease or a loan. They lacked agency to contract. Just like a 10 year old boy couldn’t sign such a contract. Further, it was substantially impossible to get a job more sophisticated than babysitter or housemaid. And took a male relative’s permission to do so.
As someone raised in CA who was a child at the same time, and whose Mom then had a fancy job and plenty of legal agency, this boils my mind.
This cannot be right. My wife taught at Greenwich HS in 1962-64 and she was interviewed and hired by the school board without permission from any male relative. What was true in CT was that contraceptives were illegal. We lived there for the first three months of our marriage and had to get them in NY.
Even probably older–my Grandmother had a cushioned chair in the corner of the parlor with an attached little table for the phone and a pad of paper, along with the cubby hole for the phone book.
College too. When I went to Cornell in 1969, it was a graduation requirement that you be able to swim. Since I was not proficient, I had to take the basic swimming course (popularly known as “Drowning 101”), which was held in the nude. Well, you could have worn a suit if you wanted to, but you would have been considered weird. The instructor, though, wore trunks. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. Having to jump into a pool in front of an audience when you can’t swim and are naked and almost blind (without my glasses) really makes you feel vulnerable.
I’ve told this story before. At the Men’sGym, during the hours reserved for men, suits were optional. They also had mixed hours when suits were required. However, at the newer Women’s Gym, women were required to wear shapeless tank suits even during their own hours. This was because the second floor that overlooked the pool had large plate-glass windows from which you could observe the pool.
In my junior year my girlfriend and some of her friends decided to “liberate” the Womens’ Pool for nude swimming. She told me when they planned to do it so I could watch the fun from the second level. At the appointed time, I heard a big commotion in the corridor that led to the locker room but no one came out. It turned out the female lifeguards had seen them coming out of the locker room and blocked them from entering the pool. I don’t think they ever got nude hours at the Womens’ Pool.
All of this was pretty funny, however, since during warm weather we had an established place down in one of the gorges for mixed skinny-dipping.
