A Salute

[voluptuary_manque]

to one of our predecessors and to her pioneering work in female sexuality.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

She has the right hat for the bear job.

 

[JackLuis]

It's kind of a sad story, but interesting. It reminds me that the "Surface Society", where all the girls are chaste and boys are vile. the President is always right and Taxes are a privilege, is so often different from the reality.

Most all of the women in my family were strong and capable, and held up to the vicissitudes of life in America well. They seemed to feel that you could categorize them anyway you wanted but they reserved the privilege of having good sense.

My mother was the first Female Hydraulic Mechanic at Norton AFB, in ~'54. Until then females were only used for clerical work. When she was sent to the Hydraulic shop to clerk, she noticed that mec's made three times what clerks made and asked for the job.

Her boss gave her a try and in three weeks she was wanting to run the test stand. Well that took some time, after all who wanted to trust a 5'2', 125 lb WOMAN with high pressure hoses?

She was my hero and her female offspring are just as aggressive in showing their capabilities. Lord help the man who says they can't do anything they want.

 

[sadangel]

Very cool Bear. I enjoyed reading that.

 

[TE999]

This lady was truly ahead of her time. I can just imagine the shock and outrage if she had published her findings immediately...presuming she could have found a publisher. Women have, in fact, come a long way.

 

[Boxlicker101]

It's kind of a sad story, but interesting. It reminds me that the "Surface Society", where all the girls are chaste and boys are vile. the President is always right and Taxes are a privilege, is so often different from the reality.

Most all of the women in my family were strong and capable, and held up to the vicissitudes of life in America well. They seemed to feel that you could categorize them anyway you wanted but they reserved the privilege of having good sense.

My mother was the first Female Hydraulic Mechanic at Norton AFB, in ~'54. Until then females were only used for clerical work. When she was sent to the Hydraulic shop to clerk, she noticed that mec's made three times what clerks made and asked for the job.

Her boss gave her a try and in three weeks she was wanting to run the test stand. Well that took some time, after all who wanted to trust a 5'2', 125 lb WOMAN with high pressure hoses?

She was my hero and her female offspring are just as aggressive in showing their capabilities. Lord help the man who says they can't do anything they want.

Women did a lot more than clerical work, even in the fifties. My mother, along with many women in our home town, worked in a cannery and most of the teachers in the elementary school I attended were women. About half the teachers in high school were women, as were most nurses. It is true, though, that many occupations were closed to women, especially those that involved risk, such as cop and firefighter, and those that required muscle.

When women's Lib came along, I wondered what they were talking about. Women had always worked, but the upper class females that led the movement may not have known that. Most of them probably didn't have to.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Uh-huh. Back in the '70's it was definitely a class-driven issue. I mean, just look at some of the jargon. "I don't want to be just a sex object!" Now who would say a thing like that? Someone working for a living or someone whose heaviest chore was making dinner after the maid cleaned the house?

I'm not saying that change wasn't needed. It definitely was, especially as far as property rights and other legal issues are concerned but to claim that no women were 'really working' was absurd. What the real beef was that they weren't working in jobs that paid as highly as the ones men held. And that was true!

 

[Boxlicker101]

The origin of the Hand Salute is uncertain. Some historians believe it began in late Roman times when assassinations were common. A citizen who wanted to see a public official had to approach with his right hand raised to show that he did not hold a weapon.

That may be part of it, but the salute required in the US armed forces is touching the forehead with the side of the hand. An armed sentry would salute in a different way. It may come from the custom of serfs and other low ranking men touching or tugging their forelocks to show subservience.

 

[Verdad]

Cool article. Does a good job of demythologizing some of the sillier ideas about Victorian era (I kind of flinch when we pretend sex was invented in, like, 1960's) but reminds the reader of what kind of absurd notions were seriously entertained and needed to be seriously debunked. Case in point:

Her master's thesis, for example, showed that women breathe from the diaphragm, as men do, rather than from the chest, as was believed at the time. She concluded that this so-called biological difference was really due to tight corsetry.

 

[Stella_Omega]

This lady was truly ahead of her time. I can just imagine the shock and outrage if she had published her findings immediately...presuming she could have found a publisher. Women have, in fact, come a long way.

I think she could have found a publisher, actually. Women would have taken a few steps much sooner, if she had!

Thank you, Bear, very cool beans!

 

[voluptuary_manque]

The part I like best is that her research plays in so neatly with Mia and Merely. The Victorians really were a happily horny lot. Makes me proud . . .

 

[3113]

This is Bullshit!

When women's Lib came along, I wondered what they were talking about. Women had always worked, but the upper class females that led the movement may not have known that. Most of them probably didn't have to.

Uh-huh. Back in the '70's it was definitely a class-driven issue. I mean, just look at some of the jargon. "I don't want to be just a sex object!" Now who would say a thing like that? Someone working for a living or someone whose heaviest chore was making dinner after the maid cleaned the house?

How very chauvinistic of you two. Let's start with Box's criticism of the women's movement being made up of ladies who didn't know that women had ever worked before--and were of a class that didn't have to know. BULLSHIT! BULL-SHIT Box! The feminist movement from it's very start always was and always did and still does fight for lower class working women like your mother. What it tried to get them was not only equal pay and better working conditions, but things like maternity leave, child care and such. Do you think men would consider that? Women did and FOR women. ALL women. You're old enough to remember when women who went off to have babies lost their jobs, or lost pay if they had to stay home to care for sick children, or couldn't get anyone to look after their toddlers.

All this the Feminist movement of the 60's and 70's fought to get for women LIKE YOUR MOTHER, not just educated and upper class women. And they DID get it for such women. So it's a flat out lie to think or perpetuate the misogynistic stereotype and myths of that time (and that somehow stick like BULLSHIT to this day) that the feminist movement was not about lower class working women. It was. It always has been. It still is. Most fiercely.

And Bear, shame on you! Regarding your comment about "sex objects" as if that was only an upper class issue! Do you not watch Madmen? Or are you still in that backward mentality that there was nothing at all wrong with men engaging in a little sexual harassment of hard working waitresses and secretaries? Maybe you just don't understand what women mean when they say, "Sex Object"--they mean that while they tried to earn their minimum wage they got pinched, grabbed and disrespected as well as pressured and blackmailed by male co-workers, customers and bosses into having sex.

The job market back in the day for women, especially young women who needed that job to pay the rent, to put food on the table and even to feed young children, was brutal in its sexism. Women were treated like they were any male's property. If they had no husband and worked, they wanted it and were "asking for it." You ask: Who would say, "I don't want to be a sex object"? Any secretary who'd ever been grabbed, any waitress who'd ever been pinched, any woman behind a counter or at a register who'd been hit on by boss, customers, male co-wokers. Any working woman at any level who'd been treated as a sex object rather than co-worker, any woman who had to spend half her work day, every day, fending off the wolves who saw her as fair game rather than someone trying to earn a living.

Thanks to the feminist movement, laws against such harassment were put in place. So in addition to bosses not being able to give all the promotions and good jobs only to men (as was the situation when my mom worked as a telephone operator), or get a raise, or even earn the same as men, the feminist gave women in the workplace--at ANY level--respectability and the right to be taken seriously. Not as, yes, a sex object. This was no easy thing to do. They had a lot of people, men and women, jeering at them all the way. Seeing them as upper class ladies who's only chore was to cook dinner while the maid cleaned the house, rather than women who'd lived through such sexual harassment, worked their asses off at low paying jobs, never got a raise or promotion and lost their jobs the second they got pregnant. Like my mother, Bear. This, women in the feminist movement, educated or not, well off in later life or not, lived through. As you did not live through it, I would take care how you judge what they said or why they said it.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I am offended that you twisted my statement in such a way. At no time was I talking about sexual harassment. For those of us who were there then, the original 'sex object' complaints had nothing to do with that. Those perfectly legitimate complaints came later. The first wave of UWW never had to deal with that kind of bullshit. It was only when genuine working class women came forward that the issue was raised. Back off!

 

[Boxlicker101]

Women did a lot more than clerical work, even in the fifties. My mother, along with many women in our home town, worked in a cannery and most of the teachers in the elementary school I attended were women. About half the teachers in high school were women, as were most nurses. It is true, though, that many occupations were closed to women, especially those that involved risk, such as cop and firefighter, and those that required muscle.

When women's Lib came along, I wondered what they were talking about. Women had always worked, but the upper class females that led the movement may not have known that. Most of them probably didn't have to.

How very chauvinistic of you two. Let's start with Box's criticism of the women's movement being made up of ladies who didn't know that women had ever worked before--and were of a class that didn't have to know. BULLSHIT! BULL-SHIT Box! The feminist movement from it's very start always was and always did and still does fight for lower class working women like your mother. What it tried to get them was not only equal pay and better working conditions, but things like maternity leave, child care and such. Do you think men would consider that? Women did and FOR women. ALL women. You're old enough to remember when women who went off to have babies lost their jobs, or lost pay if they had to stay home to care for sick children, or couldn't get anyone to look after their toddlers.

All this the Feminist movement of the 60's and 70's fought to get for women LIKE YOUR MOTHER, not just educated and upper class women. And they DID get it for such women. So it's a flat out lie to think or perpetuate the misogynistic stereotype and myths of that time (and that somehow stick like BULLSHIT to this day) that the feminist movement was not about lower class working women. It was. It always has been. It still is. Most fiercely.

Oh, come on. You must know that I was just being sarcastic. I have included all my earlier post, not just what you took out of context. What I meant to say was that the upper class women didn't have to work, not that they didn't have to know about work. Maybe I should have been clearer, but it looked alright at the time.

It was commmon knowledge in the 1950s and '60s that many women worked, and the early women liberationists certainly knew it. Many of their mothers or the mothers of their friends held jobs, and there were thousands of female teachers and store clerks and waitresses and nurses and other occupations. One of their big complaints went something like: Women should be able to be more than just housewives. They should be able to go out and work and be able to pay their own way. That attitude or belief was what I was referring to, because they already knew there were millions of women who were doing just that.

 

[Verdad]

The critique of American white, upper class feminists as insensitive to problems of other groups belongs to the 1970's, when black feminists like Audre Lorde struggled to find their voice. That's pinpointing a particular, narrow point in space and time, though, and seriously confusing the chronology.

In the Victorian era we were talking about—and for longer after that than we like to remember—higher education (and with it, access to professions) was precisely one of the things that were denied to women. One should not make a mistake of taking Prof. Mosher from the article as a rule; she was an exception, and not just for her field of study. She was exceptional in holding a PhD to begin with.

The first woman in the US to obtain an MD's diploma and the first woman in the US to graduate from a law school came around the same time. They were exceptions, too. It wasn't until the 1920's that prestigious universities even began opening their doors to women, and some, like Princeton, persisted almost to the 1970's in being exclusively male. In Mosher's time, 'an educated woman'—if by that we mean someone who could put their education to use, not just recite poetry, play piano, and smile prettily—could pretty much be one thing and one thing only: a school teacher.

In other words, before there could be educated women one could accuse of living in an ivory tower—a ludicrous accusation in any context but the one I mentioned above—women had to be admitted to higher education in the first place. It rather boggles the mind to think of how recent that achievement is.

 

[Boxlicker101]

The critique of American white, upper class feminists as insensitive to problems of other groups belongs to the 1970's, when black feminists like Audre Lorde struggled to find their voice. That's pinpointing a particular, narrow point in space and time, though, and seriously confusing the chronology.

In the Victorian era we were talking about—and for longer after that than we like to remember—higher education (and with it, access to professions) was precisely one of the things that were denied to women. One should not make a mistake of taking Prof. Mosher from the article as a rule; she was an exception, and not just for her field of study. She was exceptional in holding a PhD to begin with.

The first woman in the US to obtain an MD's diploma and the first woman in the US to graduate from a law school came around the same time. They were exceptions, too. It wasn't until the 1920's that prestigious universities even began opening their doors to women, and some, like Princeton, persisted almost to the 1970's in being exclusively male. In Mosher's time, 'an educated woman'—if by that we mean someone who could put their education to use, not just recite poetry, play piano, and smile prettily—could pretty much be one thing and one thing only: a school teacher.

In other words, before there could be educated women one could accuse of living in an ivory tower—a ludicrous accusation in any context but the one I mentioned above—women had to be admitted to higher education in the first place. It rather boggles the mind to think of how recent that achievement is.

Basically, I agree with you. My first post on this thread was about what I said when I first heard of Women's Lib. It was in the early or mid-sixties, and Betty Friedan and others seemed to be essentially saying that women should be able to get out of the kitchen and hold jobs and be self-supporting. Since women had been doing that all my life, I said something like: "Well, duh, what do you think most women have been doing?"

In fact, when I left the Air Force in 1960 and started looking for work, what I had in mind was a low level white collar job. At the time, these were mostly reserved for women, and the Help Wanted section of the newspapers were divided into jobs for men, for women and for men or women. The last category was the smallest and the middle one was the largest in terms of openings. I eventually found a job as a file clerk and general gopher, and went on from there, but I scoffed when Women's Lib. came along a few years later. I considered it to be easier for a woman to find a job than a man, although I would have admitted that it was probably easier for a man to find a position.