I have a couple of new heroes

[foreverfoxcat]

I feel horribly ignorant, but I must admit that it never even occurred to me that there was a time when women couldn't run.  I mean, it sounds ridiculous doesn't it?  But within my own lifetime, I've found out that women were simply not allowed to run more than 1500 metres at the Olympics.  I still can't quite wrap my head around it.  And that

Comments

[miwahni]

We've really come a long way in only a generation or two. I grew up during the period of greatest change, when gender roles were being challenged constantly,and gradually overturned.
When I first left school I went to work in a bank, where your career followed a very definite path; you started as a junior then moved upwards as the person ahead of you was promoted. Well, when I was due to be promoted to Teller, I was leapfrogged by a younger guy who only had a years' experience in the bank. When I protested this, I was told that he was male and therefore would make a career of banking, whereas I would leave the workforce to have babies, so it only made sense to promote this guy over me.
Can you imagine the uproar if that was said to a female employee today? Still, I should have felt lucky; only ten years prior to that incident, any female employee who got married had to resign....

[foreverfoxcat]

It's unbelievable, isn't it? I honestly can't comprehend a world where women had to resign because they got married! And yet, I think we do still have a long way to go before there's anything like true equality. Thank goodness for those women who pave the way for the rest of us.

[snailbones]

... could make their uterus fall out!

Don't you hate when that happens? *rolls eyes*

Thank you - I was completely ignorant of all of it, though I must have lived through it. We have a lot of feisty ladies to be grateful to.

[foreverfoxcat]

We do. Who, strangely enough, all emerged from their ground breaking roles with their uterus intact. Sheesh!

[constant_muse]

Really interesting, thank you. By not taking any interest in sport I'd never realised this either.
We've come so far, but there are people in this country today who seriously advocate gender segregated seating at public university lectures. harumph.

[heliophile_oxon]

Oh, I was at the demo against the UUK guidelines last week - smallish, but good speakers! (My apologies if I've already said that on lj - I know I did elsewhere, but may well have done here too. Swiss cheese brain) And for once Cameron and Gove have been (nudged? embarrassed?) into speaking out unambiguously against this retrograde nonsense.

[foreverfoxcat]

Seriously??? Why?

[heliophile_oxon]

Hat off to those pioneers, putting up with so much appalling shit when all they wanted to do was ... do something utterly normal with their own bodies. Kind of beggars belief, doesn't it. And yet women in some countries still aren't allowed to do sport now (or get the vitamin D they need from sunshine), and suffer the resulting physical ill-health. It's staggeringly, fractally wrong.

[foreverfoxcat]

It's staggering when you actually sit down and think about it, isn't it? I find the basic concept that a woman can't have sole ownership over her own body unthinkable. And yet we still live in a world where that's not the case, in so many different ways.

[hardboiledbaby]

What the ever-loving fuck.

We really have come a long way, and yet there is still such a great divide. Thanks for sharing this.

[foreverfoxcat]

Firstly - I know, wtf, right? It's mind boggling to me to think there was a time when women were considered physiologically unable to run the same distances as men. Sheesh.

Secondly - love your icon!