10 Things Boomer Women Were Told They Couldn’t Do

Young women today can open a bank account, apply to any college, and run a marathon without anyone raising an eyebrow. They take those freedoms for granted, as they should. It is hard for them to imagine a time when it was otherwise.

Their mothers and grandmothers remember. Women who came of age in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s grew up hearing the word “no” constantly. They were told what was proper, what was possible, and what was simply not for girls.

Some of those limits were written into law, and others were enforced by custom. All of them shaped women’s lives. Here are ten things boomer women were told they could not do.

1. Get a Credit Card in Their Own Name

Until the mid-1970s, a woman could be refused a credit card or a loan simply because she was a woman. Married women were often required to have their husband’s signature. Single, divorced, and widowed women were frequently turned down altogether.

That changed with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. As the Federal Trade Commission explains, the law prohibits credit discrimination on the basis of sex and marital status, among other things. Many boomer women still remember getting their first card in their own name.

2. Apply for the Best Jobs

For years, newspaper help-wanted ads were divided into “Help Wanted, Male” and “Help Wanted, Female.” The men’s columns listed managers, engineers, and salesmen. The women’s columns offered secretaries, clerks, and waitresses.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal for employers to discriminate based on sex. The text of the law is published by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency created to enforce it. Real change in the workplace took many more years.

3. Keep a Job While Pregnant

A woman who became pregnant could be fired, and often was. Teachers were commonly required to leave the classroom once they began to show. Airlines dismissed stewardesses who married or had children.

There was little a woman could do about it. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 finally made it illegal to fire or refuse to hire a woman because she was pregnant. Before that, many simply hid their condition for as long as they could.

4. Attend Certain Colleges

Many of the country’s most famous universities did not admit women as undergraduates. Yale and Princeton began admitting women in 1969. Others followed in the 1970s and even the early 1980s.

Girls with top grades were steered toward teaching, nursing, or secretarial school. Guidance counselors told them that law and medicine were for men. Professional schools often limited the number of women they would accept.

5. Serve on a Jury in Some States

Jury duty is a basic responsibility of citizenship, yet women were not always treated as equal participants. In some states, women were automatically exempt or had to register specially to serve. As a result, juries were often made up almost entirely of men.

The U.S. Supreme Court addressed the issue in 1975. It ruled that systematically excluding women from jury pools violated a defendant’s right to a jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. Only then did women’s service become routine everywhere.

6. Play Sports Seriously

Girls who loved sports had few places to play. Most schools offered boys’ teams with uniforms, coaches, and buses, while girls got little or nothing. Athletic scholarships for women barely existed.

Title IX, passed in 1972, prohibited sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding. It transformed school and college athletics. Women who were told that sports were unladylike watched their daughters and granddaughters win championships.

7. Run a Marathon

Women were long barred from distance running. Officials claimed that running long distances was dangerous for the female body. The Boston Marathon did not officially allow women to enter until 1972.

Before then, a few determined women ran anyway. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer registered using her initials and was nearly pulled off the course by a race official. The women’s marathon was not added to the Olympics until 1984.

8. Wear Pants to Work or School

Dress codes were strict. Girls were required to wear dresses or skirts to school, even in freezing weather. Many offices, restaurants, and churches did not allow women to wear trousers.

Rules began to loosen around 1970. Even then, women were sometimes sent home to change. A pair of slacks was a small act of rebellion.

9. Enter Military Academies or Fly Jets

The nation’s service academies did not admit women until 1976. Women in the armed forces were limited in number and largely confined to nursing and clerical roles. Combat positions and many specialties were closed to them.

Space was off limits as well. Although women pilots were tested privately in the early 1960s, NASA did not select its first female astronauts until 1978. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983.

10. Speak Up Without Being Called Difficult

Not every barrier was a rule. Girls were taught to be agreeable, quiet, and modest. A woman who stated her opinion firmly was called bossy, shrill, or unladylike.

That training lasted a lifetime for many. Even now, there are everyday phrases that can quietly make women sound less sure of themselves. Learning to speak plainly was a hard-won skill.

Why These Limits Existed

In the mid-20th century, a woman’s role was understood to be wife and mother. Laws and customs were built around the idea that a man would support her. Her own ambitions were considered secondary.

Many people sincerely believed they were protecting women. They argued that women were too delicate for certain work or that jobs should go to men with families to support. The effect was to keep women dependent.

Marriage came early and was expected. In the 1950s, the median bride was only about 20 years old. A girl who wanted something different faced pressure from every side.

How Boomer Women Changed Things

Boomer women did not accept these limits quietly. They marched, filed lawsuits, and ran for office. They also pushed forward in smaller ways, one job and one classroom at a time.

They were building on earlier victories. Women had won the right to vote in 1920 after a struggle that lasted generations, as the National Women’s History Museum documents. The boomers took up the next stage of that fight.

The change they brought about was enormous. Women’s employment has shifted dramatically over the past century, and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau tracks how the most common jobs for women have changed by decade. Doors that were closed in 1960 stood open by 1990.

What Remains

Not every obstacle has disappeared. Women still earn less than men on average, and they still do more of the unpaid work at home. Many carry an invisible mental load every day.

Still, the progress is undeniable. A girl born today will grow up with freedoms her great-grandmother could not have imagined. She owes much of that to women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s.

If you are a boomer woman, what were you told you could not do? And did you go ahead and do it anyway?