1961 women's employment - wow!

[ifIwerenotanandroid]

Someone found this letter in a house she bought, & posted it on X. I've never seen anything like that before.

This is why we should all listen to the generations who came before us: we may think we know what's what, but history can always surprise us. I've been amused by posters on X claiming this weekend that there have never been communal changing rooms for women in the UK & that no teenage girls ever went shopping with their friends for fun. As a member of the biddy mafia I know they're wrong but they're quite insistent, even the men.

Oh dear. There is a puzzling inability among some people to believe their own experience could in any way differ from that of the entire world population: Upthread, someone quotes a man declaring there is no such thing as 'spiking' drinks. He cites his own experience as proof of the impossibility of drink-spiking: He declares he has often been to pubs, and nobody has ever spiked his drinks.

Can you see any problem with his line of reasoning?

The other thing was that although equal pay was official government policy - the government itself has often been a pretty bad offender by finding all sorts of loopholes.

In the mid-late 1980s I had a job of auditing Civil Service Industrial pay for a government department that had a huge number of industrial grade staff. The department would penalize women who worked part-time by fiddling the contract. "Part-timers" got - lower pay rates, lower number of days of paid leave, SSP only, only statutory maternity pay (then only 6 weeks of paid leave).

"Full-time" was defined as 40 hours per week and part-time less than 40 hours. However, all of the women canteen, cleaning, machinist employees were designated "part-time" on ......39½ hour contracts!

More insultingly the HR department who came up with this wheeze was based in the Civil Service in London where "full-time" was 37½ hours.

What the ...? You do realise that you and your mum are not "most families", or didn't your grammar school teach you that?!

Mid 1970s: A lecture at school about wearing trousers being somehow "unhealthy" for women and girls. I was baffled (and sceptical) because the specifics were not explained, and because I wore trousers at home with no ill effects.

An all girls academic school, green uniform and not allowed to eat in the street - I wonder if we went to the same school!

I should add, though, that the school (all girls) was very good at encouraging girls to "go for it" academically and career-wise. The school houses were named after the Victorian-era women who founded it.

Communal changing rooms were awful. I wouldn't shop in shops that had them. I used to wait ages for the lone topshop cubicle to be free.

Your school sounds like the sort of school mine should have been, but wasn’t! We did “handicrafts” and sewing until the middle of our second year , I made a stuffed felt Bambi which I couldn’t get to stand up, and a number of small cane work baskets, plus an apron and a pair of gingham pyjamas which I sewed by hand because I didn’t understand how to thread the sewing machine and the teacher never realised 🙂. I think the handicrafts was to keep the teacher from teaching anything else, she was very elderly, also taught RE badly and I think was eventually gently eased out. Our teachers were graduates too, but they were mostly uninspiring, though in retrospect we had a very good history teacher who did try to teach outside the curriculum and get us to think, but I am afraid by the time she arrived we were used to being spoon fed pap and couldnt cope with chewing so we gave her a hard time. There was also an English teacher who did encourage me to write, but spent much of her lessons spewing out her hatred of the Headteacher, or “that woman” as she called her ,looking back I wonder if she had applied for the job as the HT was new to the post. They were an odd bunch.

Flippin' 'eck! That is atrocious.
[As are so many other stories on this thread, but the relative recency of that si shocking.]

That said, your reference to 'part timers' reminds me of interviewing, with my (female) boss, two candidates for a job and her insisting that we ask the female candidate whether they were prepared to work full-time hours. I was shocked and said if we were going to ask the female candidate that we needed also to ask the male candidate. She thought this was nonsense but I insisted. This was 2010.

Mice in the library?

Different people have different experiences.

My mother went to Grammar School in 1943 - but even though my grandad, (a working class, Eastender), was supportive of education and drilled her for the 11+ in an air-raid shelter - there was no question of her staying on after O-levels. In fact staying on until 16 to do O-levels was considered a huge educational concession.

I was born in 1962 but oddly the attitude to education passed down from my mother to me - my brothers went to private (public) school whereas the bog standard comp was considered good enough for me as the "girl". Although interestingly all of the 3 girls in my primary class, who got into the super-selective Grammar left at 16 after O'levels - none did A-levels or Uni whereas the bog standard comp encouraged it.

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP95-87/RP95-87.pdf

This sets it all out.

A woman who, unusually, had managed to qualify as a solicitor, could not break through the sexism in the profession, so she set up her own practice, which thrived.

I attended a reception for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in the early 1980s, shortly after she was appointed to the US Supreme Court. She talked about how after she'd graduated law school (near the top of her class), she couldn't even get an interview for a job as a lawyer. She got one interview and they asked her about her typing skills.

She ended up doing unpaid work experience for a local authority. She didn't have a desk, but they later started paying her.

It was mind-boggling that less than 30 years before becoming the first female US Supreme Court justice, she couldn't even get an interview for a role as a lawyer. It made me appreciate my opportunities.

That doesn’t mean anything to me but we may have been there at different times.

Our mice were made of wood and carved on the library furniture. I loved that room.

Sounds similar here too but I suspect predominantly female staff, green uniforms, no eating in the street and mice in the library were pretty common on the 60s/70s.

Its only in the last few years that War Widows (or widowers) stopped losing their pension on remarriage.

My grammar wasn't grand enough to ha e that sort of furniture.

Nor mine!

It can't have been cheap. I wonder if it was a donation. When the school merged with the boys' school some years ago and relocated it was auctioned off. I'd have loved to buy a piece but it was way out of our budget.

I hadn’t realised communal changing rooms don’t still exist, have they gone?

Yes. Rape in marriage was only outlawed in 1991 and there were plenty of people who thought that that was a bit of a nonsense even at that time. I think there may still be European countries that do not recognise marital rape as a crime?

I've heard it described as being due to a woman being considered a man's property so just like there are no laws against stealing your own wallet there were no laws against raping your own wife. Rape laws only came into existence to stop another man raping what a man saw as his property, no thought for the actual women's rights or needs just the men's.

I remember my friend telling me in about 2007 that it was significantly more comfortable now she was Mrs with the same name as her baby than as a Miss with a different name as she’s been a couple of years earlier with baby no. 1.

Agree, I opened my bank account aged 19 at uni by myself with no guarantees needed.