CHANGES FOR WOMEN IN THE 70's

Silvia Sierra 2 infantil A

Changes for women in the 70’s  (SILVIA SIERRA)

The following oral history is the result of an interview with Blanca R. She was born in Burgos in 1959 and, when she was three, the family moved to a little industrial city in the Basque Country. She remembers the seventies as a time of changes. She lived in a changing society which would promote real equality between men and women.

In the early seventies women were simply wives and mothers. Only they had to carry out housework and care and education of children. Parents treated sons and daughters differently. She explains her own experience. Her father was a doctor and her mother did the housework and brought up children. She helped her mother in these activities. Neither her father nor her brothers involved in these tasks. She remembers that they were always assigned to the girls, not to the boys. And she didn’t challenge traditional gender roles, she didn’t complain about it. 

She explains that in the seventies, after getting married, a woman often assumed her new husband’s surname. The new couple often bought cards, reflecting their name; first of all, the husband’s name and surname and then wife’s name and surname and the expression “señora de” and her husband’s surname.

In her opinion, women simply accepted the situation because they were used to it. 

There were more inequalities and sexist attitudes. She explains that, in the early 70s, in her city there were single-sex public primary and secondary schools and only a mixed public secondary school, where she studied. However, boys were separated from girls in different classrooms. Later, boys and girls began to stay at the same classroom.  At the beginning, girls were sitting on the right of the classroom and boys, on the left. It was the same in the schoolyard. Boys played in one side and girls, in the other side. She remembers that, a few years later girls and boys sat together and stayed together in the schoolyard. During early 70s there were also some differences in the treatment of boys and girls in the classroom through different programs of study. She remembers that, while girls received sewing and musical instruction, boys learnt how to do manual wooden works. What is more, in Political and physical education, they had not only different lessons, but also different teachers. Boys had a man, girls had a woman. She also says that there was a law which obligated women to complete a period of Social Service training for motherhood. Boys had to do military service.

Inequalities also appear in matter of clothes. She remembers, for example, that girls had to cover their head with a veil in church. She also says that for several years they couldn’t wear bikini. Girls had to wear shorts under the skirt to do gymnastic and they weren’t allowed to wear trousers to go to school.

She explains that one day a friend of her was thrown out of the school due to the fact that she was wearing trousers.

She also says that she went to church every Monday and she and her friends helped teaching of the catechism. They sang sons and played the guitar with children in mass. There was no boy with them, just only the priest.

In the seventies there was a strict moral. She remembers that a priest scolded her parents’ friend because they were embracing each other in the street. Besides that, girls’ attitude was generally passive. Boys asked girls to dance. They decided when to begin a romance. Parents didn’t accept that their daughter could live with a man without being married. What is more, she says that if a man and a woman wanted to go to a hotel, they were asked to show their family book in order to justify that they were married.

But over the year gender differences were in a process of change. Traditional Spanish social values and attitudes were modified and so were the role and the situation of women. Steps were taken to improve women’s status and gender differences began to disappear. But changing unequal gender roles and relations takes time.

She says that the end of the decade was a time of great transition and a period of change for women in Spain. Gender differences were reduced in this decade. Like her, many other girls expected to have a job and to be independent. In the last seventies women increased their presence at University. However, in some studies, like Engineer or Economist, women only represented a minority. She explains that in her brother’s class, who studied Engineer, there was no girl, and in her brother’s class, who studied Economist, the rate was smaller for girls, only five percent. She thinks these studies had been traditionally considered masculine studies. Her parents and her brothers encouraged her to study at University. And she wanted it too. She began her studies at University in 1976. She didn’t remember any kind of differences there. What is more, as women had been accepted their expected roles in family and society, it is in the University where she had the opportunity to know that there was a discriminatory legislation and women were on a subordinate position to men.

So she explains that, until 1975, women needed their husbands’ authorization in order to access to a formal job, to sign contracts, to purchase goods, to open a bank account and to carry economic activities.  Norms were not flexible about cohabitation or having children outside the marital relationship and the sale of contraceptives was banned. But these restrictions disappeared and some legal measures were approved reducing discrimination against women.

She thinks that these improvements could be associated with the new political system, with the democracy, even to the benefits of the tourism.

So, she explains that in 1978 Constitution was passed. And this norm stipulates that the Spaniards are equal for the law, being forbidden any kind of discrimination due to sex. In spite of that, she still remembers some vestiges of a sexist society.

 SILVIA SIERRA