In Anatomy of a Murder they called it rape throughout. No idea if that was one of the first mainstream movies to do so.
Good call. I went to the online version(GWTW is out of copyright protection in Australia so it’s on their Gutenberg site) and Mitchell used the word pregnant many times in the book- for Scarlett, for Melanie, for Maybelle Merriwether, and for anyone else who got pregnant during the course of the novel.
It also mentioned the unsightliness or unseemliness of pregnancy during Scarlett’s pregnancy with her daughter Ella:
Of course being a book it had greater liberties. For all the furor that the movie made with using the word damn it may surprise those who haven’t read it to know that Rhett and Gerald use “God damn” and its variants throughout it and there are several references to rape and even abortion.
I remember that episode- it was the Number 2 son Robbie’s wife, and she was pregnant with triplets it turned out. I remember wondering if fainting is normal for some pregnant women or if they just thought morning sickness was too icky.
Or it’s possible that when the show went into syndication they cut the line where Uncle Charlie says “Tell me Katie, when was the last time you was on the rag?”
The only “furor” was in the Production Code Office, until it revised the Production Code a month before the release of GWTW to accommodate the use of “damn” in certain contexts. No one — and I mean no one — else cared. “Damn” was common in popular novels and magazines of the 1930s.
My grandma, to this day, will not say pregnant. I recently got married and she said, “Be sure to tell me when you’re in a family way!” I have never heard her say pregnant, and at this point, I doubt she ever will.
The old people when I was a kid said ‘family way’ or, sometimes, ‘about to be blessed’ (used in a context where you understood it- ‘they’re about to be blessed again’- not just ‘she got about to be blessed after her prom’). A period was ‘her time’ or ‘her days’ ("She wasn’t about to be blessed, she was just having her days so she was bloated’).
What was strange to me though was that the old women rarely referred to any woman’s husband but instead to “her man”. What I thought was ironic was that ‘man’ sounded more sordid than either pregnant or period/etc., which just sound clinical. ‘Her man’ sounds like they were shacking up or just very casual.
“Her man is Mr. Otis’s boy and he got her blessed before the wedding and then 12 more times by the time she was 35.”
I’ve actually wondered if this may somehow have been a holdover from their German ancestors (“mann” meaning ‘man’ or ‘husband’ depending on context in German).
Half the humor on All in the Family wouldn’t fly today.
Sticking mostly to gays since nobody can say I’m being insensitive there, but I found nothing wrong with these. He’s playing an ignorant and bigoted but ultimately sympathetic and multilayered character and it was ultimately more of an indictment than if the character had just been a villain. People who aren’t KKK aren’t going to recognize themselves in a Klan character and those who are KKK aren’t embarrassed by it, but people would see themselves in Archie even if they wouldn’t always admit it, and they also sympathized with “Little Glory there” as a woman who didn’t share her father’s views but loved him anyway.
Make a sympathetic character on a show today utter one of those comments and there’d be outrage. Pierce on Community is about as close as it comes, and he’s such a clown and not the lead it’s way lesser.
Pregnancy was also called “confinement” as if the woman was in a prison. In a sense I guess she was.
People magazine ran a photo of Princess Diana in a bathing suit at five months entitled TJE PREGNANT PRINCESS. They got complaints about using “that word.” And this was in the 1970’s.
“pregnant” was definitely used on TV by the late 1960s and early 1970s. They used it in “All in the Family”. I also remember an exchange from That Girl
Ted Bissel (Donald): It’s a future pregnant with possibilities!
Marlo Thomas (Ann Marie): Just don’t put it that way when you talk to my father.
Per that link the closest was when a woman from a family of 17 children responded “Well, my daddy loves children” he said “I love pancakes but I don’t want closets full of 'em”.
It would be ironic if it was discovered it was Groucho who said “That would be ‘in the butt’ Bob.”
One of my favorite Beavis and Butthead moments was when they were channel surfing and came across I Dream of Jeannie.
Beavis: Ooh, hey, I love this show… it’s about this belly dancer who lives with this cop!
Butthead: Yeah… heh heh… she calls him master…
Both: Heh heh heh heh heh heh master…
Since it’s tangentially related to pregnancy I’ll mention that my favorite Beavis and Butthead pop-culture reference was about the birthing scene in CITY SLICKERS. “This reminds me of that movie where Billy Crystal goes out west and he reaches his hand up that cow’s ass and pulls out a dog!”
