Read A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s for Free Online Page A

Most state penal codes permitted defense lawyers to impeach a woman’s testimony by introducing evidence of previous consensual sex or claiming she had “invited” the rape by wearing “revealing” clothes or “tight” dresses. Many judges required corroboration that was almost impossible to achieve, such as having an eyewitness testify to the rape. In North Carolina, an older man could not be convicted of the statutory rape of a young girl if he could convince a judge or jury she had not been a virgin.
    The law did not recognize that a married woman could be raped by her husband. Once a woman said “I do,” she was assumed to have said “I will” for the rest of her married life. The courts held that the marriage vows implied consent to intercourse. Not until 1975 did the first state—South Dakota—make spousal rape a crime. North Carolina did not do so until 1993.
    Many states also did not take domestic violence seriously, often requiring police officers to see a man assault his wife before they could make an arrest. In some places, the police used the “stitch rule,” arresting an abusing husband only if the wife’s injuries required more than a certain number of sutures. Until 1981, Pennsylvania still had a law against a husband beating his wife after 10 P.M. or on Sunday, implying that the rest of the time she was fair game.
    A 1964 article in the Archives of General Psychiatry , published by the American Medical Association, reported on a study of thirty-seven women whose husbands had physically abused them. The authors observed that the wives typically did not call the police until more than a decade after the abuse began, often following an incident where a teenage child intervened in the violence. But rather than lamenting the women’s long delay in seeking assistance, the psychiatrists explained that the child’s intervention disturbed “a marital equilibrium which had been working more or less satisfactorily.” To hear them tell it, most problems in such marriages were the fault of the wives, whom they described as “aggressive, efficient,
masculine, and sexually frigid.” In many cases, the psychiatrists suggested, the violent incidents served as periodic corrections to the unhealthy family role reversal, allowing the wife “to be punished for her castrating activity” and the husband “to re-establish his masculine identity.”
    Prejudice and discrimination were pervasive in small things as well as big. Elementary schools did not allow girls to be crossing guards or to raise and lower the American flag each day, nor could girls play in Little League sports. Many universities still required female students to wear dresses to class, even in bitterly cold weather. Women in dormitories faced curfew restrictions that men did not, and college sports were heavily skewed toward men. Often, women couldn’t even use school athletic facilities.
    Only two of the eight Ivy League schools accepted female undergraduates, while graduate departments often capped the number of women they would admit. Unions routinely kept separate seniority lists for men and women, while professional associations limited the number of female members. In 1963, only 2.6 percent of all attorneys were female, and among the 422 federal judges in the nation, just 3 were women. Not until 1984 did the Supreme Court rule that law firms could not discriminate on the basis of sex in deciding which lawyers in the firm to promote to partner.
    Clubs such as the Jaycees could legally refuse to admit women on the grounds that it abridged their male members’ “freedom of intimate association.” In 1963, the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., was still entirely male. Female reporters who went there to hear a talk by black union leader A. Philip Randolph just before the August 1963 rally where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech had to sit in a small balcony away from the rest of the audience, where they