Molly Jong-Fast: What My Mom Told Me About America Before Roe

[Nevilledog]

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https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/email/539529cd-5645-4e17-b43d-84e768992278/

My world has always been conditioned by an automatic assumption of reproductive rights that my mother, the writer Erica Jong, did not have when she came of age. I was born in 1978, five years after Roe v. Wade. Like most women under 50, under 60 even, I find it hard even to imagine what life was like for women in those pre-Roe years. Yet that is the world we’re going back to if Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is any guide to the Supreme Court’s final ruling, now due any day.

My mother would tell me stories when I was growing up about her life in that pre-Roe world. She described a place where a man could put his hand on your butt and you were expected to treat it as a hilarious joke, to be a good girl, to be nice, however put upon you were. She told me about how anxious she was eating alone in restaurants, because she’d been told that people might think she was a prostitute. About male teachers making sexual overtures, chasing her around a table, asking for oral sex.

Mom was an undergraduate at Columbia and Barnard in the early 1960s, and got her master’s at Columbia in 1965. My mom, I always figured, was a bit creative in her retellings, but clearly even the prestigious institutions she attended were at best sexist, at worst downright predatory.

In those days, young women were supposed to move seamlessly from their father’s house to their husband’s. Mom married the first person she had sex with, her college sweetheart, or so she told me. But then, not long after they wed, he had a psychotic episode and went back to live with his family in California. Divorced in her early 20s, Mom promptly remarried. Because that’s what one did—you had to have a man to secure your right to belong in American society in pre-Roe America. Her second husband was a psychiatrist, who was soon drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Mom would write about him in her novel Fear of Flying, and then leave him for husband No. 3, later my father.

*snip*

[Walleye]

1. Very good article. I do remember all that. Any young woman in the

Workforce would expect to be sexually harassed and assaulted on the job. It was ordinary not rare. You didn’t have to be pretty either, just young.Women in their 50s and younger have no idea what it was like to live in the constant fear of everything around us. We had a little or no protection

[leftyladyfrommo]

6. I don't think I lived in fear. I learned to be very street

smart because I worked in the very worst part of the city. Street hookers worked the A and P parking lot. Pimps hung out on the street. The drug was heroin.

I learned to stay away from trouble.

We all knew who the handsy guys were. We warned each other. We were careful never to be alone with certain people. Never went out alone.

But you didn't complain. Men were in charge of everything. You could have a whole workforce of women but there was always a man in charge. And that could get dicy. You had to be nice but careful . Women who didn't play along got fired for some made-up reason.

[Walleye]

7. It's all so true. I can see why young women don't believe it.

I like to say my mother was born in a country where women were not allowed to vote. Talking about the USA of course. I also think it’s pretty hard for younger men to believe that they could’ve been drafted out of their ordinary life and forced to wear a uniform and face combat. Just as incredible

[leftyladyfrommo]

8. Those were the good old days. But I think what

business does to women now is even worse. Women have been forced to take on male management styles. I have worked gor some awful women whose management style is uber bitch. And women are under so much pressure to perform and be perfectionists about everything. By the time I was fired I was so burned out and so bored I was a mess. Our work load was ridiculous.

In the old days no one thought women could do anything very well so there was a lot less pressure.

[Walleye]

9. Oh, I know, as for myself, being sort of ADHD

But the job I wanted, and probably the only one I could do, was not traditionally female, although there were some female role models, photojournalist. So yes I lost a lot along the way to finally getting a regular job at a newspaper. But I probably couldn’t have survived fitting into any of the prescribed situations. Even if I wanted to. And I did burn out several times. But women being forced to adapt to men’s management styles maybe explains some female Republicans, I don’t know

[leftyladyfrommo]

10. My BA is in Anthropology 1969. Useless at that

time. Male archeologists and professors did not women in the field.

You went to college. Got a degree in something you loved and then got out and got a job as a secretary, a teacher, a nurse. A librarian. Those were our choices. Men didn't want women in their fields except as secretaries or general office help.

That's why so many people got married. The choices were so bad.

[Walleye]

11. Oh I know, I got married and divorced

It was a long hard road never thought I would’ve existed long enough to collect Social Security. I really hope the gains women have made are not destroyed. My niece who is in her 30s has an advanced degree in architecture and has a great job with a firm that is all women. I hope we can keep that kind of thing up

[Hekate]

2. KnR

[llmart]

3. There are a lot of female DU'ers who have talked about this many times here on DU.

Those of us of a certain age remember it like it was yesterday and we lived it and we have the stories to tell about it. Younger women need to listen to the stories and believe them. All of it is true. I worked in offices starting when I was 17 and right out of high school. I don't think there are enough hours in the day for me to relay all of the things I experienced. I worked in engineering offices where it was always all men and me (the secretary). Every day some lewd remark was tossed my way when I came in, walked by, whatever. It was constant. When I got married the lewd jokes were worse. Even when I was pregnant with my first child they were lecherous.

To be fair, there were always at least one or two men that were decent human beings, but they were not the norm.

[Walleye]

4. That is my experience. I think most young women of the time

Even those who were in jobs that were mostly women the boss was always a man.

[womanofthehills]

12. You just got good at discouraging bosses and professors without losing jobs or grades

When grabbed, I would smile, spin around and say something (like I was talking to a little boy) - “you’re a married man or you’re about to have a baby”, etc - it never even occurred to us to report it because it happened so regularly. Those were the times!!

[Johnny2X2X]

5. This is what's at stake

All the gains women have made. It's important to make light of the fact that autonomy is at stake here it is at risk. And that's what this is about for Cons, they want to make women subservient to men again.

[BradAllison]

13. Politicans sat back and did nothing because it was "settled".

We're about to become a third world country, folks.

[PlanetBev]

14. There's really no such thing as "settled law."

All it takes is time and pressure, plus a change in personnel. You can never take rights for granted.

[LNM]

15. My daughter wanted me to go see "Bombshell" with her

when she asked why I wasn't interested I told her I had already lived it.

[Samrob]

16. It's like someone else was living my life. nt