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Comment by wefarrell | Hacker News Reader

My great aunt who is a nun got a masters in Chemistry in the 1950s. She said that the only other women in her program were nuns.

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Karen Armstrong ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong ) said in her memoirs that when she turned 18 in 1962 she knew she didn't want to be a wife and mother, so she figured that she must have been "called" to become a nun.

It is hard to overstate the social pressure women were under to discard any life goals besides "motherhood" for a long time. My MIL has a math degree but knew full well that she might as well put in in the shredder once she got married. It's still kind of a painful subject for her honestly.

> My MIL has a math degree but knew full well that she might as well put in in the shredder once she got married. It's still kind of a painful subject for her honestly.

Goodness, I can imagine. If I was not given the chance to apply anything that I learned over the last two decades and was only allowed to do household chores and look after kids - as much as I'm looking forward to raising children - I would be extremely sad

It's not really surprising, is it? In a society that demands of women to get married and raise kids instead of work, it's mostly women who aren't allowed to marry and have kids who get to do things like follow a higher education.

Well, it's more than that: even by the standards of the general under-representation in college at the time, women in STEM were (and still are) pretty uncommon.

My mom got an engineering degree, '64-'68, and was also pretty much the only woman there. Women were going to college then, it's just that any woman (like my mom) showing engineering aptitude was encouraged to be a teacher since, as she was counseled, "women don't become engineers".

People tend to forget that in 1950, freedom to choose your own future as a young adult was a privilege for the very rich and political connected people. Everyone was handed role. For women that meant getting a job early until they got married. For men it was to be drafted into the military and shipped off to fight in wars. Women who refused got social pressured to conform, and men who refused got jailed.

If you were really lucky you were born into a rich family that could exempt you from the role given to you. The church may had been a alternative escape route available for women, but I don't know if that was the case here.

   aren’t allowed to marry.

The term “nun” refers to a woman in a state of consecrated life, which has a variety of forms. The states of married life and consecrated life are mutually exclusive since the latter involves a vow of evangelical chastity. My point is it’s not a matter of “not allowed” – a man or woman who enters consecrated life does so of his or her own free will with the intention of living out the evangelical virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Nobody is demanding that. It could just be that they want to.

Steve Shirley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley was able to found a computing consultancy business in the 1960s staffed entirely by women that had been fired when they got married, as was the usual practise at the time.

This is an amazing story I've never run across. Thank you for pointing it out. I think you got trolled, but I'm glad I got to learn about this as a result.

It was the norm for banks in New Zealand, through to the sixties and early seventies, to require women to have a letter of permission from their father or husband in order to get a job.

Source: have seen the ads specifying such.

Ok, fair enough I never knew this was a common practice. I was thinking more about today when I made my comment

> Ok, fair enough I never knew this was a common practice.

What makes you think it was common practice? Exceptions are a thing…

For an example of it being not just common but in some cases required to dismiss women when they married, see "The Marriage Bar" at https://civilservant.org.uk/women-history.html

I'm talking about forming all-married women businesses. I'd be shocked if that was common, but if you have data showing otherwise, I'm happy to be corrected...

It's was definitely demanded or at least heavily expected in the 60s and 50s (when these women grew up).

Nowadays it's demanded that both husband and wife work, and it gave us the two-income trap. It's not even progress.

Nowadays both men and women have the option of finding occupations that give them the most satisfaction. You might be surprised at how many people consider this progress.

If you have twice the labor, you can pay each person half as much (and double your profit) since consumption stays the same (to a rough approximation).

Financial capitalism at its best.

What you actually see is that with two full incomes housing prices went up. That's the supply side reacting to more money sloshing around. On the demand side, when both parents work there are now expenses for childcare, prepared food & so on.

You just have increased financial insecurity because now a family must rely on two incomes. In the past, when one spouse lost their job the other might find one or go to full time employment, now both parents have to be employed to be financially stable. That isn't even progress for those who have to work for a living. For the investor class it's of course different.

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