Woman Power: Did You Know This?

10 things a woman couldn’t do, even by the 70’s:

1. Get a Credit Card in her own name. It wasn’t until 1974 that a law forced credit card companies to issue cards to women without their husband’s signature.

2. Be guaranteed that they wouldn’t be fired for the offense of getting pregnant – that changed with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.

3. Serve on a jury. The main reason women were kept out of jury pools was that they were considered the center of the home, their primary responsibility as caregivers; they were thought to be too fragile to hear the grisly details of crimes. It wasn’t until 1973 that women could serve on juries in all 50 states.

4. Fight on the front lines. Admitted into military academies in 1976, it wasn’t until 2013 that the military ban on women in combat was lifted.

5. Get an Ivy League education. Yale and Princeton didn’t accept female students until 1969. Harvard didn’t admit women until 1977, when it merged with the all-female Radcliffe College.

6. Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. The first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for any legal action was in 1977.

7. Decide not to have sex if their husband wanted to. Spousal rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until 1993.

8. Obtain health insurance at the same monetary rate as a man.

9. Take the birth control pill: Issues like reproductive freedom and a woman’s right to decide were only just beginning to be openly discussed in the 1960s. In 1957, the FDA approved of the birth control pill but only for “severe menstrual distress.”

10. Prior to 1880, the age of consent for sex was set at 10 or 12 in more states, with the exception of Delaware, where it was 7 YEARS OLD!

Feminism is NOT just for other women.
Know your HERstory.

Gloria Steinem is an American journalist and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 60s and early 70s. Steinem was a co-founder of Ms. Magazine. In 1969, Steinem published an article, After Black Power, Women’s Liberation, which brought her to national fame as a feminist leader. Steinem still travels internationally as an organizer and lecturer and is a media spokeswoman on issues of equality.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972). Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbought and Unbossed—illustrates her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Betty Naomi Friedan, summa cum laude psychology graduate of Smith College in 1942, co-founder of the National Organization for Women, was one of the early leaders of the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, gave voice to millions of American women’s frustrations with limited gender roles and helped spark public activism for gender equality.