Did the Feminist Movement Get Us Anywhere?

[LiberalEsto]

39. In 1969, I could not get a job as a mail carrier or a school bus driver

because I was female.

I was turned down for a job delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy, ostensibly because the job involved heavy lifting. When I asked how that could be, I was told it meant moving big containers of pool chemicals. "Heavy lifting" was code for "You can't have this job because you are female".

I was the first woman to drive an ice cream truck in central New Jersey because I persuaded the company owner to give me a chance.

I raised hell at one job in 1976, because even though I was a college graduate and had been there longer, I learned that the male reporters at the newspaper were paid $175 a week, while the women got $150 a week. The editors bleated that men needed more money because they had to support families. I pointed out that all the reporters in the newsroom were single and that my rent cost just as much as theirs. They set up a salary guide where women and men were paid the same for the same number of years on the job.

Yes, I think things have changed considerably since the late 1960s.