Kate Long Profile picture
Mar 8, 2018 26 tweets 6 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Tonight's vintage mag snippets will be about a few of the ways 70s and 80s UK women lost out simply for being born women.
When male factory workers were banned from handling asbestos, the job was callously farmed out to women working at home.
The entire tax system was stacked against women, and that didn't end with the 1976 Discrimination Act because the government made sure exemptions were written in.
I'm guessing this blatantly unfair treatment of women impacted on their earnings, and I'm therefore tagging #WASPI_Campaign
"Mike received a rebate on her earnings and pocketed it." And that was entirely legal.
A reminder that at one time in the not-so-distant past, a woman eating alone could legally be thrown out on the street by restaurant staff.
Attitudes to redundancy:
Before 1981 an employer could sack a woman if he found out she had children.
Disabled married women had to pass a test to access their state pension.
That last was from 1983.
If you were a woman living on Sark in 1973, you might as well have been born in the 18th Century.
Thousands of working women were denied access to sick pay and pensions, *just because they were female*.
Women were routinely - and legally - turned away when they applied for credit.
In 1974, a woman could be sacked from her job the minute a man turned up wanting the position.
Here's the tax office again in 1977 - a year after the Equality Act - giving away a couple's mortgage allowance to the man.
In 1972, custody laws automatically favoured the father, whatever kind of man he was.
Even passports managed to be sexist.
Married women not paid carer's benefit because, hey, they like looking after people.
1975.
'Tis the Natural Order.
It's the MAN who's head of the household, dear.
So, there you are. Born a woman, living through the 70s and 80s? Your female body basically denies you the right to all manner of basic equalities.
Happy #IWD2018
You know, the loss of income here is bad enough, but the everyday humiliation must have been horrendous. 'Born with a uterus? The system will cheerfully treat you like a second class citizen.'
'And if you're married, you are a mere *limb* of your hubby.'

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More from @volewriter

Sep 13, 2018
Tonight's #VintageMagTweets come from this amazing stack of Women's Monitoring Network home-made magazines. They date from between 1981 and 198, though I think the group was active outside those dates.
This was their brief: to choose a date, then get women from all over the country to spot sexist or misogynistic items in national and local publications, cut them out and post them to the WMN for compilation.
The group was methodical in their approach, and the result is a revealing snapshot of attitudes to women as portrayed in the print media in the early 80s.
Read 131 tweets
Aug 24, 2018
Yesterday we saw this graph being passed around regarding gender bias in GCSE subjects. Green is boys, and purple is girls. graph shows only a tiny proportion of girls interested in construction.
Now, where would youngsters get the idea that construction was a field reserved for boys and nothing to do with girls? Here are some boys' T shirts on sale at Asda right now. t shirt showing construction vehicles
boys'T shirt showing construction vehicles
Read 18 tweets
Aug 13, 2018
In last night's #VintageMagTweets I asked how come boys are generally raised to be confident, and girls to be compliant (and the impact that has on their education and career progress). Well, today I was in Primark and I had a look at the messages on girls'and boys' T shirts.
Here are what the boys' T shirts told them they are/can do:
Read 35 tweets
Jun 21, 2018
Here we go, then, with a Cosmopolitan from 1981. There is some upsetting stuff about sexual violence in this batch, so please mute or unfollow if you need to. x
Very much the theme of magazines around this era: be careful, girls, don't ask for too much equality because it might upset the guys and we really don't want to do that.
In fact, here is the possible effect of feminism on a decent man. You've been warned.
Read 37 tweets
Jun 14, 2018
Here are tonight's vintage mag tweets. They all come from just one copy of Cosmopolitan, and I think make an interesting snapshot of the state of the world for women at that time.
So first off, a first aid quiz in which the idea of domestic violence against women is treated as a bit of a rib-tickler.
Still, they can redeem themselves later in the article and stress how unacceptable men beating up women really is, can't they? Oh.
Read 19 tweets
May 31, 2018
Just to tip you off, tonight's vintage mag clippings will be about the tax system and how it discriminated against women in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The effects of those policies are of course still being felt by #waspi women.
OK, remember the Equal Opportunities Act of 1975/6 that was supposed to bring parity to women's financial status? here's what it left out.
Here are some of the impacts of those exclusions, in 1976.
Read 42 tweets

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