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The bias of the article was clear; it used the most extreme examples to make its point. It conflated actual legal barriers with general practices, and even the legal barriers weren't necessarily nationwide. It's still sobering. In the U.S. we still haven't passed the Equal Rights Amendment, which is rather appalling. Not to mention that women still earn only about 80 percent of what men earn in the U.S.
If you watch TV from the 1950s/1960s, the casual discrimination against women is startling. There's a Father Knows Best episode, for example, where daughter Betty wants to be an engineer; her mom assumes it's a joke and tries to distract her with a new dress. In another episode, when interviewing for a job, Betty has to explain that even though she's a pretty young thing, she doesn't plan to get married anytime soon, so the company won't be wasting the training they provide.
That's the 1950s; a decade later, in a Gidget episode, Gidget is mocked and demeaned when she signs up for a shop class to learn about car repair. She learns that it's easier to pretend helplessness and let some boy fix the car instead. In a Joey Bishop episode from that same time frame, Joey wants to get rid of his pretty new secretary to assuage his wife's jealousy, so he sets up a fake seduction to make her quit. That's supposed to be hilariously funny.
Does anyone remember classified ads in newspapers? When I was in high school looking for my first after-school job, the job ads were segregated as Help Wanted--Male and Help Wanted--Female.
(Yes, I watch too much old TV, and yes, gender discrimination is a hot-button issue for me.)
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