I am going to start by saying we still live in a world where men and women are not treated equal. Over the last decade, women have seen their right to access healthcare stripped throughout the country, and anything that is seen as feminist is immediately the target of attacks by far right-wing media. The issues are even worse for Black and POC women.
While the issues are far from perfect today, just a few decades ago, things were worse. Women were expected to put up with not only sexism and misogyny, but societal rules put in place that prevented them from advancing from beyond being a housewife. And recently, I stumbled upon this Reddit thread where user BeekyGardener asked the members of the subreddit AskOldPeople, "What are some of the little things you remember related to inequality that would be shocking now?"
While the question was open to everyone, the answers were overwhelming by women who shared stories of some of the BS they had to deal with. Most surprisingly, some of these stories are as recent as the '90s. Here are what they had to say:
1. "My doctor needed my husband's approval in order to get me contraceptives."
2. "Twice in the '90s I was not given a job because I wore a pantsuit to the interview and they found it 'unprofessional.' After that, I started wearing them to all my interviews to weed out companies where I might end up being harassed for daring to wear pants."
3. "I worked in a bank in the '80s. No slacks. I also kept an extra pair of pantyhose at work in case I got a run. The manager would send you home to change otherwise. I wore a slip under my dress. And no chairs behind the teller counter. I stood in heels for eight hours. Sometimes when the manager was on the phone, I’d take my heels off for some relief."
4. "In the late '50s, my mother ran a TWA ticketing office at the Waldorf Astoria. Businessmen from all over the world would stay at the hotel and during part of their stay would need to make travel arrangements for their next destinations. My mom would set up these itineraries with hand-written tickets from sheer memory of the flight schedules."
5. "My mom was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship — in math. The nuns tried really hard to get her there...but nope. She had to stay home and 'keep house' for her older brother because their mother had died."
6. "In my hometown we had a big, amazing Boys Club with a huge gym, basketball courts, and a big playground with lots of equipment. Across the street was the Girls Club. Two rooms with some sewing machines, crayons, and a couple of swings out back."
7. "In the '60s, my school had signs in the hallways near each entrance stating that no women were permitted in the building unless they were wearing a dress or skirt. Your child could be sick or bleeding and you couldn't pick them up if you had pants on."
8. "I remember in third grade, one of my female classmates got sent home to change because she came to school wearing pants. One of my friends grew up in poverty and always had to wear her sisters’ hand-me-downs, and unfortunately, her sisters were all shorter than her. At school, she was constantly getting punished because her skirts were too short. The test for that was, she had to kneel on the ground, and if the skirt didn’t touch the ground, it was too short."
9. "In the 1970s, I was not allowed to take shop or drafting in high school because it would 'distract the boys.'"
10. "In 1953, my mother needed to buy a car while my dad was in Korea. Texas law didn't allow married women to buy a car without the husband's signature. The bank manager told her to just sign my dad's name."
11. "I was told in 1985, by a work colleague that women shouldn't be in the workplace because they are taking men's jobs and that he'd never work for a female manager. This was a very common attitude spoken aloud back then."
12. "If you were the only woman in a group of men at work you were automatically expected to make the coffee, take the notes, be the hostess, put up with rude jokes, plan all the parties, and take whatever crap you were given no matter what your skill set, education or work experience was. I was the manager of a specialty department and other men deferred to the most inexperienced man I supervised."
13. "I have an older friend who was an aerospace engineer (which is still an incredibly male-dominated field). She sometimes talks about all the stuff she had to put up with when she started working in the early 1970s. She's commented multiple times about male coworkers who would comment that she, 'needed a good spanking,' particularly if she disagreed with them. I work at the same company now and will be forever grateful for the sacrifices she and women like her made so that I don't have to put up with junk like that."
14. "I was allowed to be asked if I was pregnant or planning to become pregnant in job interviews!"
15. "I had to get my dad's permission to get a bank account at age 18 — this was in the early '70s."
16. "I will never forget that one of my mother’s office job duties was to clean the men’s bathroom. I could not understand how it was related to the paperwork she was doing all day and why, with so many men around, they weren’t cleaning up after their own piss. I also remember a male coworker swatting her ass as she walked by, while I sat and colored."
17. "Classified ads had different job categories: Help Wanted - Male and Help Wanted - Female."
18. "My mom was told she had to have her husband or her father give permission for her to start working part-time at Sears. This was in 1967 and she was 20 years old."
19. "My mother was refused access to an engineering school because she would take the place of a 'man who needed to support a family.' She was encouraged to take math so she could be a teacher."
20. "In 1964, my grandmother had to quit her corporate job because…she was pregnant with my uncle. Pregnant women couldn't work for the company after they were showing. She had to quit, and then was rehired four years later. She's in her 90s now and still talks about losing four years of her pension."
21. And lastly: "Driving. Endless women driver comments."
You can read the full thread of responses on Reddit.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.