It was very difficult to achieve income parity in 1972 because professional careers were mostly closed to women - the admissions gurus wouldn't let us into medical school, law school, engineering school, etc., etc., etc. The argument for limiting access to women to the kinds of education which had high ticket salaries was two fold: (1) they are taking the place of men who need to earn a living for their families and (2) they'll just get pregnant and leave the workforce - why invest?
And, to round off the equation, women (prior to the Equal Credit Act) could not get a bank loan without the cosignature of a husband or father or other male relative. The same went for buying a car, trying to buy a house, or getting a credit card only in the woman's name. The Equal Credit Act changed all of that misogynistic financial stranglehold. The first thing I did at age 24 was get an American Express Card in MY OWN NAME. It's difficult for young women to understand while our country claims to have 'liberty and justice for ALL', when it comes to females, obtaining liberty and justice has been and continues to be a fight.
Currently legislatures around the country are filled with angry men, mostly white, but really MAGA American men who are pissed off that they have to compete in the economic arena not only with other men who are not white, but also with women. Currently, young women are winning the economic race. They are getting more education, and thus, are more prepared for the new economy. Young men seem to be dropping out and signing off. Slightly older women are successfully managing challenging careers and having children. Women in my age group are cheering them on feeling these gains for women are the result of all the barriers we broke down.
Well, if you can't compete with women straight up, what do you do? You begin to legally restrict women's rights. You comb the books looking for laws which will accomplish the result of pushing women off the playing field by any measure which can be gotten away with. For example, in Arizona you resurrect an 1864 law banning virtually all abortions. The law was finally repealed this year by ONE VOTE.
Get ready for the Comstock Act: This is a federal law passed in 1873. It originally banned sending obscene material through the US Postal Service. Disseminating information about conception or abortion was considered an obscenity. Enter into the picture Margaret Sanger. 
As a nurse and public health advocate, she discovered some women, especially poor women, were having babies every year. By age 40, their bodies were worn out and many were dying prematurely. Sanger took on the Comstock Act by opening a birth control clinic in 1916. She was promptly jailed. Over her lifetime, she made it a crusade for women to obtain birth control information. She was also the founder of Planned Parenthood. Many challenges wound through the court system until 1936 when birth control was removed from the Comstock Act. However, the Comstock Act is still the law on the books - especially as it pertains to abortion.
Why is this important? The Republican party would like to enforce the Comstock Act (federal law) to halt the use of 'the morning after pill' which is being sent through the mail to countless women who do not have the resources to travel hundreds of miles for an abortion. There are untold numbers of women who are bearing unwanted children because of the restricted access to abortion. There are women who are being refused medical care by doctors afraid of losing their licenses or going to jail. The most restrictive abortion laws make no exceptions for abortion for any reason. Raped and pregnant? Too bad. Baby discovered to be severely defective? Too bad. Can't afford another child? Too bad. There are many stories of women forced to labor and deliver a child with no brain, organs outside the body, or an abused or raped girl holding her teddy bear as she labors and delivers. Horror stories. Infant mortality has zoomed up into double digits in the states with draconian abortion laws. Without access to the abortion pill, we'll be back to the back alley abortions of my day in unsterile environments. Or, even worse, the do it yourself abortion with a metal coat hanger.
While the Comstock Act has not been enforced for decades, and Roe V. Wade seemed to make it obsolete, the true facts are that Republicans know they can't win on this issue at the ballot box, so the new strategy is to comb the books for ancient laws, which are surely unconstitutional, but oh so handy to continue to erode the hard won legal and financial rights of women as these dinosaur laws are challenged in court. These types of laws will surely wind up before a Supreme Court which has shown a predilection for legislating morality - especially as it applies to women. The Comstock Act is a federal law, and it's still on the books.
This essay is not meant to be a debate about the right or wrong of abortion. It's about control of womens' bodies and forcing them to bear unwanted children. It's a gauntlet which has been thrown down. We've achieved our hard won rights by fighting for every one of them. We've only had the right to vote for 104 years, and it wasn't handed to us. It took decades to achieve. My grandmothers grew up unable to vote. If you can't vote, you have no voice in what happens to you.
This is an election year. Women must ban together AGAIN to protect not only ourselves, but also our daughters. It's time to get out the vote. In the land of personal freedom, no one should have the right to control me based on my gender.
