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In reply to the discussion: Who remembers life for women before RBG? [View all]The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,673 posts)During the '60s and most of the '70s the men's job listings had all the professional positions that paid well, while the women's jobs were limited to clerical help, nurses, elementary school teachers and babysitters. I graduated from college in 1969; during my last semester I went to my academic advisor to get some help about future jobs, and he told me, "Don't worry about it; you'll just get married." Even with a degree from a highly-regarded liberal arts college, the only job I could get at first was as a copyreader for a newspaper.
While I was able to get a car loan on my own, I was treated like an idiot by salesmen when I was shopping for one. I remember one car I was interested in that had manual transmission (which I was was familiar with), but when I took it for a test drive with the salesman he said "You shift pretty good for a girl." And that was the end of that. No sale.
I got married about five years after graduation, but my husband (now my friendly ex) wasn't making a lot of money either, so I had to keep working full-time. Eventually I realized that a woman with a BA degree was doomed to a life of shitty clerical jobs, so I went back to grad school for awhile, then law school. By this time there were a lot of women in law school so things were improving somewhat - but even by graduation the men were snapping up the jobs in the prestigious law firms while the women were getting few, if any, offers. I recall one story - possibly apocryphal but I like it anyhow: A woman applied for a job at a snooty law firm and somehow managed to get an interview. At the interview she was asked whether she could type, and she responded, "Yes, I can type. I can also fuck, but I won't do either for money," and walked out the door.
It has taken a very long time to get where we are now, and I do fear that we could lose a lot of what we worked for.