I remember my mother, a teacher and the main bread winner crying tears of rage that she had to get her husband to co sign on a gas heater she was buying on the never never, must have been about 1970.
Single women were not allowed to enter bars unaccompanied by men. I don’t know when that changed.
The administrators figured you would get pregnant and quit, and they would have the bother of finding a replacement even in the middle of the year.
My mother had difficulty renting an apartment in the early 1960s because she was single. The thinking was that she might have sex in it. And that a “nice girl” should not live alone.
She also tells of having trouble establishing credit as a single woman. She had a bank account and credit card, but needed my grandfather to cosign her car.
When she married, she needed my dad’s signature to make financial decisions, even though he was an enlisted soldier and she made far more money than he did (she was a fashion model).
I couldn’t get my tubes tied in the early 2000s (over age 30). Because I “might change my mind”. Mind you, I’m a severe asthmatic and have chronic migraine. Pregnancy is probably not a good idea.
In the 70s, there was no occupation of which I had ever heard that needed written permission from their father, unless the female was underage.
You’ll find that a lot of financial decisions by either sex require(d) the signature of the spouse.
As I mentioned, this may be an U.S. issue and a regional issue at that. Sterilization is more common in other countries.
A family friend’s daughter died from complications of sterilization. She was over 30 and had no kids. She had no trouble finding the doctor (could perhaps have selected a better hospital). My high school friend had her tubes tied after delivering her first and only kid when she was 21, and had no trouble with getting that. My cousin’s wife had her tubes tied after delivering her second child, when she was in her early 30s.
Also, this is not counting the reports that have come out over the years of cases where mentally ill women or minority women (blacks, Latinas) were sterilized, without their consent, knowledge, and/or approval, in/within the U.S.
You left out whore, excuse me, food handler (that is the label they used to make UHC available to “working girls” under Franco, thus giving them access to regular STD testing and treatment, and other gynecological services).
These things vary by location, of course, and in Spain we went back and forth a lot.
In the late 19th century, one of my great-great-greatgrandmothers was able to sell her deceased husband’s “Notary Public office” and use the money on a successful bid for the position of “innkeeper at the train station” (she’d inherited the office but couldn’t hold it, as she didn’t have the required law degree nor would she have been allowed to get one). Her granddaughters wouldn’t have been allowed to post such a bid personally, they would have needed a man to do it for them.
In 1938, my great-grandfather got imprisoned when the Nationals captured Barcelona. Since he was a cop of the kind whose families live in the police headquarters, my great-grandmother and their unmarried daughter got kicked out in the street. They couldn’t rent housing due to being women, my grandfather did it for them. Again, when my mother needed to rent a room while working as a teacher in the 1950s and 1960s, the contract needed her father’s signature, in this case due to her being a minor well into her twenties. Men were adults at 21; women at 25.
In the 1910s, a “tribunal de reválida” from Salamanca University was very surprised to discover that a certain R. who’d been doing his coursework long-distance and needed to pass his reválida (an oral exam “revalidating” the long-distance work) was a large blonde called Rosa. They rapidly searched all available regulations and discovered that, under a 16th century law (thank you, Queen Joanna), public universities were actually open to women. My great-aunt passed the exam with flying colors and went on to work as an engineer in the country’s largest foundry.
In the 1970s, the engineering college I eventually attended (and which, being private, was not subject to Joanna’s law) went through a pretty bloody battle between those who wanted to allow female students and those who did not. I graduated in 1994 and there were still several teachers who did not want “girls” there.
Which financial decisions made by men required their wife’s signature but didn’t involve the wife’s income or joint property?
The only ones I can think of in the US involve retirement benefits- and that’s a fairly recent development
My mother, who became an RN in 1952, was perhaps only the second married student the nursing school had allowed to graduate. She told a funny story from her student days of when she and the others were providing care in a ward. One of the patients was a man with an injury on his scrotum and the bandages needed to be changed regularly. You’d think these would be tougher minded girls who expected to see it all, but Mom said it was “Sharon, you do it, you know about these things!”
One of her fellow students was a young woman who’d quit nursing school several years earlier because she’d married. Then she got divorced and came back to school. Students slept on the third floor of the dorms, and instructors on the first, but the returned girl had to have a room amongst the instructors, because she was an “experienced woman”:smack:
While Mom was a student one of her classmates was the first black student ever in the school. The girls would go out for lunch together, and would only go to certain places, because in the others their classmate was not allowed to sit down and eat. Also, when they went to the movies the whole contingent sat in the balcony of the theater, because the black student couldn’t sit downstairs with the white patrons.
Much earlier, in 1926, my grandmother taught school in a one roomed schoolhouse and got married to my grandfather secretly, so she could finish working the school year. They lived apart for the rest of that period, and snuck around on weekends. It’s fun to think about your grandparents, of all people, being young and in lust.
This thread is enlightening. Just last week I got called out in a thread for saying I had no interest in going back in time since I can’t think of any era where being a woman wouldn’t suck. And even here, we have people claiming it wasn’t so bad to have no right to own assets, make essential decisions, be essentially dependent on your husbands charity, etc.
Can we please just agree these things sucked?
Many states have what are called spousal homestead rights. Even if only one spouse owns the property, effectively the other spouse must waive their homestead rights before the spouse who owns the property may sell it, mortgage it, or otherwise dispose of it or encumber the title.
And to clarify, I’m not referring to community property states where the property may be part of the marital community.
Married persons (men or women) who try to sell or mortgage their individual real estate holding may often find that especially cautious buyers or lenders will require their spouses to sign a quit claim or a waiver even when the spouse has no rights in the property.
Here is a handy chartof the various state requirements.
I recently watched CNN’S series “The Sixties”. I’ve always known intellectually that times were different then and that it generally sucked for women and black people, but the documentary has made it more real to me. And the 60s really weren’t that long ago! Almost everyone I know was alive during that time period and witnessed the oppression first hand.
Which is why it shocks me how folks can be so quick to hand-wave away racism and sexism today. Or say that the lack of parity between white men and women/minorities is due to intrinsic deficiencies, not systemic biases and discrimination. We really are a stupid people doomed to repeat past mistakes.
I could not wear pants to school until the seventh grade!
—And that was in 1976!
On a related note, my father was an up-and-coming junior executive at JC Penney in the late '50s. Part of the application and interview process was for his wife to throw a tea/luncheon function for the other executives wives, who would then go home and let their husbands know if my mom met the standard for being a JC Penney executive’s wife.
Had she not done well, Dad wouldn’t have gotten the job.
Had Dad not gotten the job, perhaps he would have invested in the first McDonald’s in the greater Milwaukee area… he turned it down because (a) he didn’t really have the time, and (b) he didn’t think the concept would fly.
This is true. In 6th grade, where I went to school, girls took sewing, 7th grade cooking, and 8th grade sewing again. I am just no good with a sewing machine. I do fine by hand, but not with machines. So in 8th grade I started agitating for me to be able to take woodshop with the boys. I had to get special permission from the principal and a note from my parents and it was a big deal. This was 1978.
The class was taught by a woman, fer chrissakes!
In the summer of 1967, my mother turned 17, and married my father about a month later - it wasn’t a “shotgun wedding,” no pregnancy or pregnancy scare, they chose to marry. My mother wasn’t allowed to return to school to finish her senior year, because… morals? I don’t know. (But there were at least two married men in what would have been Ma’s senior class.)
Similarly, (although this is well before the time frame specified,) my husband’s maternal grandparents both finished medical school in 1938. They married secretly that summer, and then did their residencies at different hospitals. The marriage remained secret because, while he would have been able to complete his residency if his marriage had been publicly known, she wouldn’t have been allowed to complete hers as a married woman. (She was also the only woman in her year at the medical college - there was one other woman in the year ahead of her, but that woman didn’t graduate. She refused to attend urology classes, because the subject matter was “unladylike.”) In a similar vein, even after graduating from college and medical school, when Dr. K entered her residency, her first assignment was to the “colored” VD clinic at that hospital - apparently, TPTB thought that she’d refuse, and that they’d drive her away from medicine…
And - similar to Nava’s grandmother’s story - my great-grandparents were sharecroppers when my G-grandfather died in the winter of 1928. One day after becoming a widow, my Granny buried her husband; and two days later, she became homeless. The sharecropping contract was with my G-grandfather, not with Granny, even though the terms of the contract assumed that the entire family would have to farm in order to fulfill their obligations.
Happily, in all three cases, these women were able to overcome their difficulties. My mother got her GED and went on to higher education, my grandmother-in-law completed her residency and practiced general medicine for four decades, and my great-grandmother became a successful farmer and substantial landowner in her own right.
When my mother bought cars up to the 70’s, even though she had an income and paid a mortgage, her father had to cosign loans for her. I don’t know what would have happened if she had no man to do that for her.
When I was in kindergarten in 1967, I recall a discussion led by the teacher, as to what we all wanted to be when we grew up. I was the only girl who didn’t say “teacher” “nurse” or “mommy”. I said “actress”. At the time I lived with my grandmother and great grandmother who were factory workers. G-ma worked for McDonnell Douglas making planes, and GG-ma worked for Rockwell North American making Apollo rocket ships.
I am an actress, by the way, though I don’t make my living at it. Most recently I was in a production of The Women - I got to play the Nurse, whose speech to spoiled Edith says a lot about the class distinctions between rich and poor women - Edith had her baby in luxury, while working women had their babies at home and got up to cook their husband’s breakfast the next morning.