Tonight's vintage mag tweets are about women's access to education, and the points where they've been restricted either through institutional bias or individual.
Were you a girl who went to a grammar school? If so, well done. You had to get a higher pass mark than a boy sitting the same exam.
Oh yes, you read that right.
Were you a woman who managed to gain a place at uni to read medicine? Well done. You had to get higher entry grades than a man.
And remember, medical schools had strict quotas for female students.
Which obviously impacted on the number of women getting into those professions.
Here's Paddington medical college boasting that it pushes the 15% quota to anything up to 25% - imagine the generosity.
How's this for a bit of twisted logic?
Yes, this was progress, but you can see the damage that had been done by an industry that not only refused to train women, but to employ them at the end of that training.
Here's Oxford University in the mid 70s grudgingly admitting a few women 'because the men aren't up to scratch'.
Educating women is seen as an 'experiment', to be reviewed.
This is why women's colleges matter! And why women's bursaries and scholarships and support programmes are so valuable!
And once again, this discrimination must have had an impact on #WASPI women because it was yet another way of depriving them of their true earning capacity.
Anyway. That's all for tonight, but I'll finish this batch on Thursday. xx
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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.
Yesterday we saw this graph being passed around regarding gender bias in GCSE subjects. Green is boys, and purple is girls.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.