Can I ask a question about women's history.....a bit embarrassed that I don't understand it

Goodness Yonic, that thread was an odd one even for AIBU

That moonferret chap was a card, non?

tilder

I got my first propper job in 1986, at that time we were not allowed to discuss pay with other employees, all women worked 9-5 and men 8.30-6.30m this was the excuse for discrepancies in pay.

The company did not employ married couples, if a couple got together at work and married one had to leave.

It was well known that another local company did not employ women with children. Now at the time maternity leave was quite new but women did return to work after having a baby, but the other company would just offer a huge amount of money to not come back after maternity leave.

Lilymaid, at my college my (female) senior tutor said that when it went co-ed, she was the first female fellow, and when questioned on the changes required to accommodation, had said the only thing the women would want that men didn't was a full length mirror.

I did know this level of discrimination existed in the 70's, its just shocking really to see it written down.

Makes me wonder what stories I will have for dd in 40 years

There were also formal/informal restrictions on women at universities until the 70s.
I applied to Oxford a couple of years before any of the then men's colleges accepted women. This meant that it was much more difficult for women to get into Oxford and Cambridge. For my subject there were 13 places per year for women and around 300 for men. When women were admitted to men's colleges there was concern about the fall in academic standards that would inevitably occur!
At other universities, lack of accommodation for women was used as an excuse not to give them places. Sex Discrimination Act saw the end of this.

I think in the 50s nurses were not allowed to be married?

After the Second World War women who had been working in factories and on the land were pretty much forced back into the home because they were taking jobs away from the returning men.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1292949-to-feel-short-changed-by-feminism?pg=2&order=

There is a chicken and egg thing here too. Cost of living goes up, more work needs to be done to maintain living standards. I think blaming the rise in the cost of living on women because they went out to work is a bit of an oversimplification.

Will link the thread in my next post but here is a brilliant post on it from HerBeX:

Hmm, it's not just the increasing mortgage capacity because of both people going out to earn money that has raised the price of houses, but just for the sake of your argument, let's pretend that that's the only cause.

You shouldn't be blaming feminism for high house prices, you should be blaming men. The fact that their wife went out to work meant that they could work less, therefore they should have lobbied for the right to work part time - at that time unions were quite powerful and society and attitudes were changing rapidly, so they would probably have won that right. Then both parties could have worked 20 hours a week instead of 40, both could have done the housework (instead of most of it being dumped on the woman of the house) and houseprices would have remained pitched at the level of an income of 40 hours a week rather than 80. Instead of working with women to lobby for this change, men en masse took the piss out of the demand for equal pay and the right to work after marriage and opposed every effort at equality. So now a family needs to work 80 hours instead of 40.

(I don't really believe that btw because globalisation and the freeing up of the financial markets have had a big impact on house prices too, but am just arguing the toss. Put the blame where it lies. Feminists don't run the country, don't run the banking system and don't run the world. It's mad to blame people who don't have power, for what is happening economically. If feminists ruled the world, you'd have a point.)

It's not just the fault of the two income families. It's all those single women wanting their own homes. Surely they know they should stay in their fathers home until they are married? Then there is the whole issue of divorce and even more homes required.

Women, know your place.

This has been a really interesting thread - had no idea how recently some of this went on, and it helps contextualise some of my parents' generation's attitudes, such as pil (late 60s, so hardly ancient) thinking that childcare is something we need because I work, rather than because dh and I work (and both work at the same times).

Would be interested to read some sort of analysis as to the costs of living and whether there has really been growth in the number of women working/number of dual income households and whether latter has affected former.

House prices are surely a big part of it, and are beyond all reason now - but my impression is that this is more to do with decades of growth in number of households (people living longer, and more smaller households as people marrying later, divorcing more) and bog-all building, relative to this need. Think the solution is in building more homes, rather than banning anyone from work or divorce.

Wage stagnation hasn't helped has it.

I bought a flat in the late 90s and was looking earlier how much and it was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO cheap!!!!

True - too many women choosing not to share a house (ie get married) with a man means too much demand not enough supply

Oh,we had a big thread on that years ago. Let's see if advanced search likes me today

Of course it's women's fault omnipotent! Allowing married women to go out to work, and unmarried couples to cohabit, has meant that there are more two-income households who can afford to buy and spend more money on houses which has put the prices up! Yet another example of how Feminism Has Gone Too Far

It's the property prices Nickel, a consequence of living on an Island which lots of other people want to live on with you

The purchase by foreign investors of property in London has had a terrible knock-on effect for the rest of the country as well.

So for once, it's not women's fault!

Everything else is of course, obviously

tilder sounds like an excellent conversation!

This is where I love the net so much, a DC can ask a question about anything and there it all is. You can go from watching a video of the International Space Station to pictures of the Sufragettes to films of baby leopards it's brilliant

It would be so lovely to have a financial society that meant that only one wage was needed to support a family.
Why does it seem like a massive jump??

I managed to buy and keep a house on a £9k wage in 1999, okay without a family, but why has it only taken 15 years to get to a stage in the uk where a family with 2 incomes is struggling?
It's insane!

Maybe the woman giving up work (officially and in decent jobs) on order to marry and raise a family was one of the things that kept cost of living low?
I know history well enough to know that's bollocks, but I bet some men at the top had it on their list of "why married women shouldn't work "

My aunt didn't, lightening, she adopted a child years after marrying.

So really no excuse for chucking women out of jobs they wanted / needed / enjoyed on the basis that they were going to get pregnant immediately.

It would have made more sense to say that women weren't allowed to work after getting pregnant, if that was what it was really about.

Plus women have always worked on through having children. Whether paid or unpaid. As per "shitwork" comment upthread.

The main reasons for these traditions / rules are rooted in ideas around what women's roles should be, and making sure work is available for men, rather than anything practical.

My eldest (aged 8) asked me the other day why I didn't have the same surname despite being married. We had a very interesting conversation (!) But made me realise how ignorant I am as well.

We somehow how got on to suffrage and when women got the vote. I said it was about 100 years ago, but I think it was even more recent than that. We have come a massively long way.

I'm surprised no one has pointed out that back in the 20s they didn't have effective contraception. So if you got married, you got pregnant. And then you have all the practical concerns about childcare.

In that time, childcare meant the mothers, unless of course like puddymuddles nan you were lucky enough to be able to employ help.

The two world wars showed up the attitude that women as workers were a dispensable force (the attitude behind such things as the marriage bar) - except when they weren't of course. In the two wars women took dangerous/arduous jobs - spies, front line medics/nurses, munition workers, lumberjacks(jills), farmworkers, plane transporters etc. etc. - all work men had decided women were incapable of, until of course, they needed them when they miraculously became capable and after the wars miraculously became incapable again.

It's the attitude of women as second class who should never show their education for long, never have any personal ambition beyond domesticity and be content to trail around dependent on men (consequently at the mercy of male goodwill).

Imagine if fathers all had only one option when they married - househusband with a duty to look after the wife and no alternative but to be dependent on her for their bread. Daft isn't it? Except that was what was expected of women. As a mother that was all you were - for ever.

It was still, to a degree, the attitude when I started work in the early 1960s - the difference being that we were the daughters of the women who had helped Britain to survive the war and were thanked by being told to bugger off back to their aprons and fluffy slippers afterwards. No way were we going to let that happen to us despite the bilbodogs of this world.

A lot of these stories are shockingly recent.

I think people forget just how different things were just a short time ago really.

Things are miles better for women in a lot of ways aren't they

unclerory banks have been very intrusive employers until quite recently. When I was working in one in late 1990s/early 2000s some of the intrusions included copies of our bank statements being forwarded to our managers each month, and if they wanted to they were allowed to question you as to how you spent your money. We weren't allowed to get involved in anything outside of work without written permission from management eg joining PTA or doing voluntary work. And perhaps my favourite, we had to have written permission to move house. If your manager thought that the house was unsuitable (eg too long commute, too big a house for your needs) they could, and would, refuse permission.

Getting back to the original point, that same bank were forcing women to resign on marriage right up until around the late 1970s. I knew a lady who is only in her 60s now who was proud to be the first female employee to have been allowed to keep her job.

My MIL had to leave her job when she married, the marriage bar was still law for the civil service in the country she lived in, and this was in 1974!