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In August 2019, as many people took to the Internet to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote on paper, a piece of text started to circulate on social media that supposedly listed 9 things that women couldn't do until 1971: A similar post on Facebook with tens of thousands of shares reported much the same in 2016 from user Lisa Bialac-Jehle. In general, the list above accurately reports nine things that women couldn't do in 1971. We'll take a closer look at each item below: Get a credit card in her own name As this post explains, banks were able to discriminate against women applying for credit cards until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in October 1974. Women could get credit cards prior to this legislation, but as The Smithsonian notes, they were likely to be asked a barrage of personal questions and were often required to be accompanied by a man to co-sign for a credit card. Even then, women often received cards with lower limits or higher rates: Be guaranteed that they wouldn’t be unceremoniously fired for getting pregnant Women faced a number of work-related consequences for getting pregnant prior to the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. On the 40th anniversary of this law, the ACLU posted a statement explaining how pregnancy often resulted in pink slips for working women: Serve on a jury Women's road to the jury box was a long one. While the state of Utah deemed women qualified for jury duty back in 1898, it took the other 49 states several decades to reach the same conclusion. The ACLU noted that women were excluded from jury duties for a number of reasons: While this viral posts states that it wasn't until 1973 that women could serve on juries in all 50 states, we found that this battle was still being fought for at least another two years. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision that it was constitutionally unacceptable for states to bar women from juries. From a 1975 article in The New York Times: Fight on the front lines Women in the United States have been aiding military operations as nurses, cooks, and in other non-combat positions since the Revolutionary War in 1775. However, it wasn't until 1976 that the United States Military Academy at West Point accepted women to the Corps of Cadets. Still, it would be several more years until women would find their way to the front lines. In 1994, the Pentagon restricted women from serving in artillery, armor, infantry and other such combat roles. This ban wasn't lifted until 2013: Get an Ivy League education The Ivy League is comprised of eight universities in the northeastern part of the United States. While women were able to attend Cornell University as early as the 1870s, it wasn't until 1983 that the final Ivy League school, Columbia College, started to admit women: Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to Time, the term sexual harassment was coined by a group of students at Cornell University in 1975. The term was popularized in a New York Times article published that same year, and in 1977, three court cases confirmed that a woman could take legal action against her employer for sexual harassment: Decide not to have sex if her husband wanted to This item is referring to spousal rape. The first person to be convicted of spousal rape in the U.S. was a Massachusetts bartender who broke into the home of his estranged wife in 1979 and raped her: Even though the first conviction for spousal rape occurred during the 1970s, it wasn't until 1993 that spousal rape was officially illegal in all 50 states. While marital rape has been technically illegal in all 50 states since 1993, advocates argue that there are still legal loopholes in some states that allow for marital rape to be treated differently than rape. Obtain health insurance at the same monetary rate as men This item refers to the practice of gender rating by health insurance companies, which typically resulted in higher premiums for women seeking individual health insurance. In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) sought to do away with the practice. NPR reported: The birth control pill This post correctly states that the FDA first approved an oral contraceptive (a birth-control pill called Enovid) in 1957. However, at the time, the pill was only approved for use as a treatment of severe menstrual disorders, and the FDA required that it be labeled with a warning that Enovid will prevent ovulation. A few years later in 1960, the FDA approved Enovid as a contraceptive. Still, the pill was only available to married couples. It wasn't until 1972 that birth-control pills were available to all women, regardless of marital status:
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