Were women really that oppressed?

Taking your post one bit at a time:

Women were mostly limited to being a stay at home wife and mother. If a woman chose to remain single, she was required to work, but it was at jobs that no man would do (maid, teacher, nanny, seamstress, etc.) Can you imagine (whatever you think of their politics) of someone like Sonya Sotemeyor or Sandra Day O'Connor being just a teacher? How frustrating that would be to have all that intellect and not being able to use it?

Any money she made would be given directly into the hands of her closest male relatives or could be kept by her employer if she had no male relatives.

Education was optional. Some women received it, some did not. And, unlike men, where it might have been a matter of not having the funds to have an education, very wealthy women were often not provided enough education to read or write.

Women could not own property, and, in fact, women were CONSIDERED the property of their husbands and fathers. That meant that marriages were arranged without her consent, that children could be taken away from her without her having a voice, and that she could be beaten and raped without any legal protections to fall back on. They could be impregnated over and over -- even against a doctor's advice -- and not have a choice about bearing the child.

If a woman was pregnant and the husband was not known to be the father could face severe ostracization (even if it was a rape). Further, rape was considered to be the fault of the woman, not the perpetrator.

Notice that I said "COULD." That doesn't mean it always and/or automatically happened. Men never have been, and never will be, the great Satan to women. A great many marriages were made through love and with the woman's consent, and she lived happily and with no danger to her.

But even the kindest and most well-meaning of men would have found the notion of women controlling their own finances to be a bit hilarious.

Working during the Great Depression was not an option, but a necessity for all families, including children. Also, once the US entered World War II, the government did encourage women to work in munitions factories, airplane factories, etc. (think Rosie the Riveter). But that was only due to a shortage of male workers. Once the soldiers came home, women were laid off and had no recourse.

As for women voting, your information is only half right. Women were granted the right to vote in Wyoming as early as 1890, but they could not vote for federal offices (President, Senate and US House). They could not HOLD elected positions. And, no, it was not just that it was considered "not being socially acceptable." Women were actually arrested for attempting to vote. As a previous poster said, the right to vote on a national level was not granted until the 1920s.

Men being more chivalrous? That is a serious misrepresentation of the past. Men are no more or no less chivalrous now than they have ever been.

Keep in mind too that the "old people" you knew probably weren't born any later than possibly 1920. They saw a lot of change socially and were affected by the change.

Are some elements of feminism overstated? Yes. But having control of our own bodies, the ability to make our own choices in living our lives and controlling our property is enough to have made feminism extremely worthwhile.

OK, let's get your myths out of the way. Most U.S. women could not vote until 1920. There were a few states that allowed women to vote a FEW years earlier than this, but not many.

Secondly, men were allowed to beat and rape their wives in though days. There was no protection for a women from her husband once she was married. If he beat her and raped her, the cops wouldn't come. It was his "right" to do so.

Finally, it's incomprehensible that because you don't think housework is unpleasant (probably because you've never done it), you think it would have been OK to force women into it.

It doesn't matter how "good" you think women had it (cooking, cleaning, raising children while pregnant, laundry, gardening), giving a person NO CHOICE as to how to live their life is slavery. No exceptions.

You are viewing history through misogynistic rose-colored glasses.

Edit: Yes, but men were allowed to vote. Own property. Choose their professions. Get educated. Not marry if they chose (being a bachelor did not have negative connotations). They were not beaten and raped by their wives with impunity. They were not expected to carry on their work while constantly pregnant and breastfeeding. Prior to 1920, women had taxation without representation, which was what the U.S. was formed to abolish (for white men, anyway).

It depends on what you wanted from life. If you enjoyed washing dishes, fine, good and well. If not, it must have seemed like drudgery. Can you imagine, hour after hour with your hands in cold mucky water, every day?

I was denied an education in the 70's. My mother decided I didn't need one, she'd never had one and all was going to do was get married. I had to fight to finish school. There was never a chance of further education. I was paid less than a man for the same job, simply because of my gender. Out of school I joined as a clerk - my salary was less from the word go. And yes, it was advertised - it was quite accepted that men and women earned different salaries.

Chivalrous men? Hm. Some might have been, some weren't. My grandfather walked out on my grandmother, leaving her with four chldren under five to support. She had to put them in an orphanage.

Beating your wife to keep her in line? Dear God .... if you thnk that, then you need some form of education yourself. Since when do you beat a grown adult woman to "keep her in line"?

Women have always been able to find work - in the menial jobs. They were servants, cleaners, factory workers. Women were often employed in place of men because they were paid less.

I'm a grown up - I have a brain. I don't need a man to tell me how to keep myself in line, or whether or not I can vote, or whether or not I am oppressed.

If you think it's okay to treat women as second class citizens, that's your right. But don't try and tell me the feminist movement was unnecessary.

The 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920 gave women the right to vote. More specifically, it made it illegal for the US to discriminate against the right to vote based on sex. If women were voting before hand, it was state specific.

The "rule of thumb" actually did exist. Which was a law that allowed men to beat their wives with a stick that could not be thicker then their thumb.

Women were not allowed to own land, or other property.

Your grandmother is a special exception. By your story, she came to the states unmarried, so yes, she would have been required to have a job. Once she was married, she stopped working and became a housewife. It was up to the men of the house how they treated their wives. It sounds like your grandfather was/is a good man.

Yes, women were very oppressed. But they fought for their rights and got them. They still make less money working the same jobs, so their fight continues.

I am a male, btw, just in case you were wondering that.

Women's rights were restricted in past times, but so were the rights of most men. In the UK for example, the majority of men did not have the vote until the lae 19th century.

And while educational opportunitites for women were restricted, they likewise were for the majority of men. Until fairly recently, most men, like most women, left school at an early age to go to work.

However, it is true that many forms of employment were closed to women, and that women were generally paid less than men for doing the same work. And it is also true that a married woman was, to a large extent, in subjection to her husband, he had complete control of her property, including any money she might earn after they were married.

However, most women did not regard being housewives as a fate worse than death. In fact, married women whose economic situation improved so that they were able to give up work generally considered themselves fortunate. As recently as the 1960s, women did not worship work they way they do now. I can remember that in the 60s, having to continue work after marriage was consideed highly undesirable.

For more than a decade, the American people endured a pitiless, hardscrabble life, victimized by the structural collapse of the American economic system. Millions of American workers wanted jobs but couldn't find them. Millions of American businessmen needed customers but didn't have them. The broken economic system failed them all.

From Shmoop

*"I was saying that men in those days were more chivalrous. That means they treated women with respect. I was saying it seems unlikely a person would beat another who they respected."

Wow, you really are clueless. The schools don't teach about women's experience in history, only men's history. Men's history and fantasy. This is PRECISELY why Women's Studies courses are as necessary as ever. Thank-you for posting.

********************************************************

"Those traditional gender roles assumed that all women were members of families with a male breadwinner at its head, but that description did not always match reality. Women who were widowed or divorced, or whose husbands had deserted them, struggled to keep their families afloat; single women had to fend for themselves. These women were truly on the margins, practically invisible. The iconic image of the depression is “The Forgotten Man”: the newly poor, downwardly mobile unemployed worker, often standing in a breadline or selling apples on a street corner. Women who found themselves in similar dire straits rarely turned up in public spaces like breadlines or street corners; instead they often tried to cope quietly on their own. “I’ve lived in cities for many months broke, without help, too timid to get in breadlines,” remembered the writer Meridel LeSueur. “I’ve known many women to live like this until they simply faint on the street from privations, without saying a word to anyone. A woman will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse.”

Women who sought relief or paid employment risked public scorn or worse for supposedly taking jobs and money away from more deserving men. When Norman Cousins realized that the number of gainfully employed women in 1939 roughly equaled the national unemployment total, he offered this flippant remedy: “Simply fire the women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression.” Yet this attempt to make women scapegoats for the depression rested on shaky grounds. Many women had no choice but to work, providing the sole source of support for themselves or their families."

As far as I can tell, it's all about perspective.

We could say "women were historically expected to stay at home"

It might be true.

But is is necessarily oppression?

The working class man is known to have a shorter life span than the average woman... he is expected throughout history to work his butt off and to keep the family in food & shelter.

I'd say both were fairly oppressive in their own ways.

But, one group has done a whole lot of whining - while the other group hasn't.

Some lies never die, thanks to feminists and their sympathizers.

"The "rule of thumb" actually did exist. Which was a law that allowed men to beat their wives with a stick that could not be thicker then their thumb.

Women were not allowed to own land, or other property. "

Actually, women COULD own land and properties, however, they would need to inherit it. Somehow, feminists always manage to forget this fact.

The rule of the thumb is yet another feminist lie. Rule of the thumb refers to a carpenter using his thumb as a rough guide for his work.

Why do feminists continue to spread lies about history?

not really oppressed, so i dun get what they are trying to fight for