This is a scanned copy of an 2007 article from Savvy & Sage magazine. I'm sure they won't mind me reproducing it as it is essentially a copy of a 1943 article from another magazine. I think it's safe to say we've come a long way from 1943...
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This is an extraordinary example of convenient amnesia. I can't find it online but I remember attending a photographic exhibition of women working as welders on the Glasgow dockyards during WWI (similar account of welders but in London).
Women had originally been recruited to work unskilled positions but acute skill shortage led to them being trained as welders and for other skilled tasks. After the Armistice, by and large they lost their jobs to the returning men and to some extent, the memory of their technical competence seems to have been erased.
It's always interesting to see bits and pieces like this that remind us of how much things have changed.
This is well within my grandparents lifetime, and it's interesting to me that my gran thought women's lib was crazy. She valued men standing up for her and opening doors etc. higher than all the equality stuff. She was intelligent (1st class degree), worked all her life (as a teacher) and was very strong willed - there was no way that she was going to be oppressed. But she still thought feminism was completely wrong.
Depending on her age, it must have been quite unusual for someone of your grandmother's age to have attended university?
Even with my mother's generation, none of the girls in the family attended university because of the cost. In fact, they alternated. Eldest went out to work which paid for the 2nd eldest to go to college (Teacher's Training). 3rd went out to work to help pay to put 4th through college. Neither of the 2 who went to college obtained a university qualification until much later in life when both obtained a sabbatical to allow them to do this.
There was a recent discussion in the NYT along the lines that reason that women are still fighting to hold on to the advances that they won in the 70s is that people like Schafly or other privileged women managed to argue that legal protections and feminism were superfluous. So, more than 30 years on, in the US, it is legitimate for various states to be attempting to restrict a woman's access to contraception.
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