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. Fifty years is only two generations.
Our country is now 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 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 they 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 The law was finally repealed this year by ONE VOTE.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 and amended in 1920. It originally banned sending obscene material through the US Postal Service as well as information about conception or abortion. Information about conception in 1873 was considered an obscenity. Information about conception was removed in the 1920 rework of the law thanks to one courageous woman who was willing to go to jail for trying to get birth control information to women, specifically women who were bearing a child a year, most of whom were dead way before their time - their bodies simply worn out. Her name was Margaret Sanger. She's mostly lost to history as are countless other women who were willing to stand up for us even when it has been illegal, and unpopular.
The Comstock Act does make it a crime to send or receive anything which may cause an abortion. Why is this important? The MAGA wing of the Republican party would like to halt the use of 'the morning after pill' which is being sent to countless women who do not have the resources to travel hundreds of miles for a simple medical procedure. There are still untold numbers of women who are bearing unwanted children many of whom are the outcome of rape. Others are severely defective - such as the woman who was forced to labor and deliver a child with no brain. Infant mortality has zoomed up into double digits in the states with draconian abortion laws.
While the Comstock Act has not been enforced for decades, and Roe V. Wade seemed to make it obsolete, the true facts are that Republican 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.
