"Every woman is one husband away from poverty ..."
... is the saying, or something similar to that. The feeling behind the statement has not been true for only about fifty years or so. Maybe not even that.
That is a chilling thought. In my mom's time, it was expected that a woman after high school would get married and have kids. That's it. No exception. She didn't go that route, but she was only one of the few. Most of her other friends did, because that was simply what was done.
There were some instances were woman could work, yes. But that was in the area of teaching or secretarial work.
I saw the sneak preivew of Miss Potter this weekend, where it was a mostly biographical movie of Beatrix Potter, and the events leading up to her publishing her first book. She was a thirty-something woman living with her parents, because she had never found someone she wanted to marry (based on how the movie portrayed those suitors, I hardly blame her. :-P), and fortunate, becauase the subject line didn't apply to her. Her parents were wealthy enough to still support her.
But she had always had a love of sketching animals, and telling little stories about them. So the movie opens with her approaching a publisher, for probably the hundredth time, about getting her book published. They agreed. And up until the book actually was a success, and there was a demand for more, most treated her books as amusing hobbies, something she could dabble in. But these books weren't something that would go against societal norms of acceptable female behavior -- not only was it a literary thing, it was a literary thing involving children -- which is the domain of the woman.
It was very touching to watch her glee in realizing she'd be published ... and sobering to realize that had she been passionate about pretty much anything else, she wouldn't have had an outlet.
What if Beatrix had wanted to pursue chemistry? Or law? Or math? Those fields were closed to her. Had the literary field been closed to women, we never would've had any of her books.
Which led me to think ... what kind of advances have we, as a society, missed because women weren't allowed to pursue anything outside of the home for so long? How much further ahead would we be in physics, music, law, medicine, chemistry, math, religion, all of it, if women had had the same opportunities as men? Where would we be right now?