Back in the 1970s, mixed-gender friendships were still somewhat suspect, and many landlords would not rent to couples who were “living in sin”. Three’s Company’s interesting bit was how often Jack pretended to be gay (also still quite taboo at the time), rather than just claiming the three were cousins (or something).
There was another TV show about men living in a (female) single sex boarding house called Bosom Buddies.
Much of what is common on TV these days.
Any couple in bed, married or not.
Same sex kissing. Or even holding hands in a homosexual context.
(grmph. More later. Work calls.)
When I met one of my first serious BFs online* at the age of 17, my mother absolutely flipped because she was sure that only axe murders and socially maladjusted freaks met people online.
Despite the fact that he was most definitely not socially maladjusted, was an honest-to-goodness Catholic altar boy and that he never once tried to hack me to pieces with a butcher knife, my mother never quite got over her initial impression of him as a crazy internet maniac.
I’m sure mothers still freak out when their 17-yr-old daughters meet boys online nowadays, because mothers always freak out at the idea of their baby girl dating any boy, regardless of how they met. But it’s definitely not the same level of “OMG the police will find your body parts in a cement block” hysteria that I experienced 15 years ago.
Plus online dating is a multi-billion dollar industry that advertises on prime-time TV. I think that’s as un-scandalous as it gets. 
When I was a teen in the 60s, condoms were always behind the counter at drugstores; now they’re usually out in the open (and in supermarkets, too).
Abortion was pretty scandalous back then (and illegal). No one would ever admit to having one. Women would often try to self-abort with things like coathangers.
I got a lot of grief for having a mustache in high school, and no responsible adult male would ever grow a beard.
A little before my time, but Ingrid Bergman became a pariah in Hollywood for getting pregnant with Roberto Rosselini when she was already married. She was even denounced in Congress. Nowadays, few would be outraged.
Ten.
Oh! Not me, but my mom.
When she started college (in New York City, 1964) you had to take a test to determine if you had any non-standard accent, including any variation on a New York accent. If you failed, there was a mandatory dictation class to strip you of your accent and make you talk proper-like. You had to keep retaking it until you were “fixed.”
That’s kind of creepy. What school, if you don’t mind my asking?
I can raise you on this one. Around 1970 my brother and I were in a drugstore waiting for a presscription. In walks a transvestite and he loudly asked for condoms. Every customer in the place nearly hit the floor.
Nowadays this probably happens 100x a day in most major cities.
Don’t kid yourselves; in the 50s, plenty of unmarried people screwed and, while you didn’t talk about it, it was not scandalous. And there were plenty of babies born “five months premature” weighing 8 pounds. But an unmarried man and woman actually sharing living quarters was truly scandalous.
My school had some rule that a female could visit a man in the dorm only on Sunday afternoons, the door had to open and all four feet on the floor.
Gays were firmly in the closet and I at least had never heard of lesbians.
I am not sure the word “pregnant” was ever used on radio or early TV until Lucille Ball was. Pregnant school teachers were at least put on leave if not fired. A generation before that, most school districts did not allow married female school teachers. The result was that my elementary school teachers were bitter old maids that hated little boys. Several of them had taught my mother!
F friend of mine graduated from Princeton, '53 and they had compulsory chapel. (Jews were exempt, but had to get at least eight "attendance cards from a local synagogue each term.) My friend was caught playing bridge in the balcony of the chapel and that was consider scandalous.
I Love Lucy was actually the second sitcom to have a pregnant main character (the first being Mary-Kay and Johnny in the late '40s of which no recording survives). Every script during Lucy’s pregnancy had to be approved by a priest, minister, and rabbi. The word “pregnant” was never actually said in dialogue. Lucy was “expecting” or as Ricky put it “spectin”.
One of my social studies teachers first started teaching during the Kennedy administration. The district was one of the last to employ married women and nearly all the female teachers were spinsters. Ironically my great aunt once told me that when she started her teaching career (in the 1930s) some schools didn’t want to hire an unmarried woman to teach Home Economics (which she had an actual degree in).
Pregnant teachers weren’t so much “fired” as they were deemed to have “retired”. It wasn’t so much that they did anything immoral by getting pregnant (assuming they were married) it was the belief that once that had children their place was at home, not the workplace. Now a single teacher getting pregnant was clearly a whore who was morally unfit to teach children.
I remember watching The Mothers-in-Law as a kid, and a character used the word “pregnant”. My mother shut the TV off so fast, I thought she’d broken it.
When the TV version of Uncle Buck was on the air, a kid said, “That sucks!” or some variation, and it was pretty scandalous a child actor would use the word “sucks”. Recently I saw an ad for something, and the tagline used the word (I try my damndest to not pay attention to any ads, so I don’t remember the product or wording, but it was something like, “This [product] doesn’t suck.”)
Madonna.
(I was born in 1983)
My aunt graduated from teachers’ college (2 years, I think) and was hired as the only teacher at a rural one-room schoolhouse in a small village, about 15 miles from her home town. When she & my uncle wanted to get married, they had to run over to South Dakota, and get married in secret. For at least 5 years after that, she concealed from the school board the fact that she was married and living with her husband. For example, he was not allowed to answer the phone in their house, she did. This continued until she became pregnant with my cousin. Turned out that didn’t bother them too much; being a rural farming community, all the kids knew the basics of reproduction from raising animals. But there was much concern over how the kids might be affected by the name change from “Miss Bonham” to “Mrs. Johnson”. And some other towns thought it was scandalous that their village would allow a married woman to be a teacher.
But they apparently liked her, though. She started teaching there before she was 20 years old, and continued until she retired in her 70’s. 50+ years of being the only teacher in the school. At the end, the whole school board was people who had been her students, and she was currently teaching their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When she retired, they closed the school down and consolidated with a bigger school district.
That’s about the coolest thing I’ve heard today. If only we could all leave such a legacy.
Being left handed was seen as a bad thing. When I went to school in the late 70’s early 80’s it wasn’t as big a deal. I have met people a little older than me who did get their knuckles smacked (mostly by catholic nuns) for using their left hand. I have also heard of kids hand tied behind their back to get them to become right handed. Nowadays that teacher would be fired and the lawsuits would begin.
Nothing here, someone else mentioned it.
Mr. Neville and I did not live together until after we got married. I did visit him and stay over at his apartment every weekend, but every Sunday night I went back to my own apartment. This struck our friends around our own age as very odd, maybe even verging on scandalous. Of course, at one time, living together before marriage would have been scandalous.
I knew that Mary Kay and Johnny (the titular couple was married in real life as well as on screen) had shown the main characters sharing a bed, but not that Mary Kay’s pregnancy had been written into the show. Fragments of some late episodes survive, although there are apparently no known complete original recordings.
When I was in junior high 40 years ago, one of the grades decided to use their student activity money to rent two films and spend the day watching them. They chose two Hitchcock films “Psycho” and “The Birds”. The PTA went ballistic and forced them to choose a more moral film. They ended up with the Cary Grant film "Father Goose
I came in here to mention this. The nuns told my brother, a leftie, that being left handed was a sign of the devil. :rolleyes:
A sex ed talk by our principal, a nun, told us that a girl could get pregnant by holding hands. This was in the late 70’s.
I think one of the bigger adjustments from then to now is the ability , for the most part, to discuss mentall illness. Back then, *you did not talk about Crazy Uncle Bob * and whatever his problem was. Now, hell, you take out a billboard sign to tell everyone you have Big Farkin’ Issues!!!1111!!!
Another is listening to OLD PEOPLE talk about illnesses (which is their entire entertainment system nowadays and thenadays*.) whenever the word CANCER came up, they would [size=1]whisper it*. As a kid I never got this. Now, everyone just blabs about it without thinking that cancer was contagious by words.
*New Word.