Welcome to the 1950s, the world that social conservatives would like to revisit in a major way. In this era, only one in three women worked. We drove gas-guzzling cars like this one:
We watched TV shows like Father Knows Best, Fury, Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show. Popular movies were: 1954, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window; 1957, 12 Angry Men and Bridge on the River Kwai; 1958, another Hitchcock classic Vertigo; and in 1959, Ben Hur and Some Like It Hot.
In the 1950s, the most popular forms of birth control were withdrawal – and condoms. Yet, in 30 states, anti-birth control laws prohibited or restricted the sale and advertisement of contraceptive devices. Yes, you read that correctly. In Massachusetts, it was a felony to “exhibit, sell, prescribe, provide, or give out information” about them. In Connecticut, it was a crime for a couple to use contraception.Really?? This was law?
I couldn’t find any reliable statistics about how many women died from illegal abortions during the 1950s; the facts were skewed according to political parties. So let’s look for statistics about how many abortions have been performed in the U.S. since 1973 and Roe v Wade: nearly 40 million.
The current world population is about 7 billion. The planet can barely sustain this number. Can you imagine what it would be like here in the U.S. with an extra say, 100 million people that would’ve resulted by continuing the abortion ban? And that’s a conservative estimate. But if the Republicans have their way, contraception will be banned – except for withdrawal, huh? – and abortion will be so mired in government intervention that women will seek illegal abortionists. You know, coat hangars, herbs, poisons, witches, potions.
Yet, men can obtain Viagra from their physicians, free of any intervention. Why? Why should men have ready access to sex-enhancers while women are denied access to birth control and basic health services that are provided by Planned Parenthood and other similar organizations?
The easy answer is that male politicians who are promoting this legislation are stuck in time, circa, 1950s.The constituents who support them will do virtually anything to maintain the status quo. But the more difficult answer is that these people are part of a dying paradigm and that paradigm is on life support. It gasps and wheezes, it flops around like a dying fish.
The sad fact for these guys is that the majority of voters are women. Any woman who votes the Republican ticket in 2012 is brainwashed, there’s just no other reasonable explanation. How can you, as a woman,vote for men who seem to believe Marcus Welby is a real doc, the kind who comes to your house when you feel like crap and charges just ten buck? How can you vote for politicians who regard you as kind of Donna Reed, no job, no skills, just a uterus that pops out children?
Take a look around, boys. The 1950s died with the Cold War. The Pentagon has new enemies now and women have permeated all your sacred cows: politics, the Supreme Court, TV news, publishing, movies, TV, psychoanalysis, academia, science. We no longer sit in the wings as beings created from Adam’s rib. When you ask us to get your coffee, your Band-Aids, your dinner, your whatever, we have a choice. “Something wrong with your legs, friend?”
My best friend is a conservative Alpha Male and he married a woman who votes Republican. She’s the stereotypical “9/11 Security Mom” (as social scientists called them in 2004). How can a woman vote Republican? Easy. There actually are women who believe men should lead the household and they have very traditional views of the roles men and women play. I see this with my friend’s marriage. It’s definitely not my style, but to each their own.
Hopefully, though, the majority of women will vote Democratic and even better: that more females are running for Congress this year. Oregon just elected a new female member of Congress to replace the Congressman who raped the teenage daughter of his friend from high school. We did our part in Oregon, now its up to the rest of the country to do their part!
I hope you are right and women wise up before the election. I have never voted Republican and never could, it seems so… wrong. I have never had an abortion but if I had needed one, I would have. The whole Viagra thing seems backwards to me: without an erection, there’s no need for birth control! Or am I missing something here?
I cracked up: without an erection, no need for birth control. Hello, republicans??
Amen Sister!
I remember reading somewhere that if every woman in the U.S. had only one child in her lifetime, in 50 years we would return to the population level at the turn of the century. Unfortunately, I can’t locate where I read that at present.
We’re now entering into the time of collapse of many systems, because the environments sustainability is collapsing. I think that massive denial, which your article is about, is a completely understandable, but tragic consequence. We need political, social, and spiritual systems that enable us to deal with the crisis before us. Instead, as you point out, we have lot of what Michael Moore called “stupid white men” (although they can be female and of varying skin colors as well) whose solution is to return to the “good ole days”. And of course, one aspect of the “good ole days” was a world where “men were men and women did what they were told.”
I am resigned to a lifetime of being dismissed as a “bra burning feminist” (I never burned ay bras, by the way)…….because I’ll say it over, and over, and over: we’ve had gender inequality for thousands of years, and it is deeply embedded in virtually everything. Our religions by and large still embody values and rules for women that might have worked for wandering tribes of nomads 5,000 years ago (or little settlements constantly being invaded, where 2 of every 3 children died, and a lot of the women died in childbirth as well)………..might have worked then (although, the Bible doesn’t appear to have been written by any women, so we don’t know how they felt about it.)
Anyway, thanks for your article. I also find this Republican thing about lowering the price of gas insane……..more denial.
>>We’re now entering into the time of collapse of many systems, because the environments sustainability is collapsing.
Lauren, watch for your post on Sunday.
The GOP has turned into a very weird group of old white men – even if they’re young or female.
Yea but Elvis made his best music in the 50s! Sorry, shouldn’t be flippant – agree entirely about the right to contraception for all. This includes third world countries where it’s often specified that aid monies mustn’t be used for the ‘evils’ of contraception.
It is a bit of a contradiction that Viagra is okay but contraception isn’t. I have a theory that the hidden ‘powers that be’ want the population to rise. It’s why, for example, a flood of immigration has been allowed into the UK and is altering our way of life. Probably all about money – the seriously rich and powerful live away from it all.
True about Elvis! And your theory could be right, Mike.