our mothers didn’t know they would have rights
employers could refuse to let a female employee wear pants until 1959
🌧 click here to listen to my ‘shaken snow globe’ playlist
happy thursday my sweet!
i currently feel like i live in a snow globe, hence the name of today’s playlist.
i know that this is an intense and busy time for most people, but i have felt myself slow down these past few weeks.
i feel so lucky to live in flow as much as i can, and right now that means sleeping in more often, waking up slow, watching the snow from my window, and cozying up with popcorn and early 2000s movies (i watched in her shoes and the family stone this week and related to them MUCH MORE than i did when i first saw them).
the moon
when you’re reading this, the moon will be in pisces. i’ve already been having very detailed and dramatic dreams so i’m not necessarily looking forward to this 😂
pisces rules dreams, intuition, psychedelics, intoxication, and otherworldliness. it’s romantic but slippery (like a fish lmao… hard to hold on to). as a mutable water sign, it bends and molds itself depending on what situation it’s in.
in my opinion, it’s the most intuitive sign of the zodiac. people with lots of pisces placements or even particularly strong individual placements are often lowkey psychic.
that is to say… listen to your intuition right now! has the universe been sending you messages that you’ve been ignoring?
write down your dreams, go easy on yourself, and do whatever you need to stay grounded. even though the moon is in pisces, you can still put yourself first and hold your boundaries.
our mothers didn’t know they would have rights
i feel like i haven’t done a disclaimer in a while… let me disclaim! i’m writing this from the perspective of a white millennial woman who has a boomer mom. i’m also writing this from a north american/canadian perspective. if you’re not a millennial or don’t have a mom who grew up in north america, you might relate to this differently, and that is a-okay.
every time i see a tweet like this, i’m reminded of how our mothers were raised in a world where women had so few rights.
i’m reminded of it when my oma calls herself stupid because she can’t do her own banking.
she’s 95, and even when i tell her that she was raised in a different world, she tells me i’m making excuses for her and she should’ve figured it out. she’s constantly in awe of what i’ve been able to achieve as a single woman, and i so appreciate her being proud of me, but i also acknowledge that she grew up in 1920s germany where not only was it unfathomable for a woman to buy a house by herself, it wasn’t legal.
when women could do things
here’s a list of when things became legal for women (and in many cases, it was legal, but probably still difficult, especially for women of colour):
by 1918, white women had all gained the right to vote in federal elections in canada. it wasn’t until 1960 that indigenous women were able to (source: the borgen project)
employers could refuse to let a female employee wear pants until 1959 in california (source: wikipedia)
sexual harassment on the job was first considered by human rights commissions in the 1970s and, by the early 1980s, unions began to insist that employers enforce policies against it. in 1984 legislation providing redress for victims of sexual harassment was introduced into canada's labour code. (source: the canadian encyclopedia)
it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that a woman could access a line of credit independently without a man to cosign her application (source: family handyman)
sex was added as a protected characteristic to the fair housing act in 1974 (meaning that women legally couldn’t be refused the right to own property based on their sex) (source: national low income housing coalition)
women couldn’t be reporters until the 1970s (source: wikipedia)
barring women from practicing law was prohibited in the U.S. in 1971 (source: wikipedia)
the equal credit opportunity act was passed in 1974, which let women obtain credit cards separate from their husbands (source: nerdwallet)
reading these is making me upset! this timeline of women’s legal rights in the united states on wikipedia is pretty exhaustive if you want to get into it more
picture this
for my mom, this means that right before she was born, women weren’t allowed to wear pants to work. sexual harassment in the workplace wasn’t even an addressable concept until she was 10.
she, nor my grandparents, would’ve thought it was possible for her to be a lawyer or reporter until she was 10.
she, nor my grandparents, would’ve thought it was possible for her to own a house by herself or have her own credit card until she was 13.
imagining this makes me so emotional. i think back to when i was 10, when i was 13. i was a whole ass person with passions and hopes and dreams by then. even as a 90s kid, women doing things solo wasn’t overly represented for me, but it wasn’t literally illegal.
no wonder so many of our mothers grew up thinking marrying a man would be the ultimate accomplishment for them. marrying men gave our grandmothers access to so many things they wouldn’t be able to access alone.
sidenote: the years i’ve listed are all when things became “legal”, but i can imagine that A LOT of men were not happy with these new laws, and probably had the power and standing to bend them as they chose. i had trouble getting a mortgage as a single woman in 2021 so… i can only imagine.
women’s rights and the mother wound
when our mothers project limitations or disbelief on us, it really isn’t about us or them. it’s coming from the world as they knew it growing up. it’s coming from the generations before them who were legally not allowed to do the things we can do now.
(if you’re like, what’s the mother wound? i wrote about it here.)
and now, a tiktok
this is kind of unrelated, but also very related. if you’re in a relationship idk… maybe don’t watch this if you’re feeling easily offended 😂
that’s it for this week love!
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xoxo
m