Thanks for the link,
Bookpossum.
Things are better, yes, but I recently read "
The Land Before Avocado" by Richard Glover about 1960s and 1970s Australia, and found it a rather rude shock to be reminded just how recently some of this stuff changed:
Quote:
To list all the ways in which ’60s and ’70s Australia was terrible for women might test the patience of the reader, besides which Anne Summers has already done it in her stirring polemic Damned Whores and God’s Police, first published in 1975, just at the end of our own period of time-travel. All the same, the sexism of the period is one of the starkest examples of how the Australia of a few decades ago seems like a radically different country. Try any one of these facts on a young Australian and watch as they look at you with mute disbelief:
• Married Australian women needed their husband’s permission to leave the country. It wasn’t until 1983 that a married Australian woman no longer officially required her husband’s permission to be issued a passport.
• Until Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act was introduced in 1984, a married woman usually couldn’t open a bank account, purchase property or maintain a credit card without her husband’s permission.
[...and many more...]
|
In 1983 a bank was offering me, a virtually penniless - but male - University student, a credit card, and I didn't need anyone's permission to make that rather foolish decision.
It has been a long road, and still going.
Now I think it's great that younger folk might look on such details with "mute disbelief", but if the changes are that recent it scares me to think how easily we could backslide ... although further discussion of current examples of that actually happening probably belongs on the P&R forum.
Perhaps this is one reason why the story in this book still works as well as it does. The disparities are all too familiar to any of us more than a few decades old.