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Tonight& #39;s #VintageMagTweets come from a 1975 edition of Nova. Nova was a British women& #39;s glossy magazine that was published from March 1965 to October 1975, and was regarded as quite provocative and political.
There& #39;s a lot in this edition, but we& #39;ll start by looking at this article about men who wear make up and dresses.
Why can& #39;t they, when women wear trousers? asks the opening paragraph. I really like this article.
Lots of striking illustrations of men wearing clothes that you& #39;d normally associate with women. It& #39;s not drag. It& #39;s men wearing things they don& #39;t normally wear.
"He should look like a drag queen...but he looks natural."
"Johnny...defies the modern-day mania for pigeon-holing."
A dress covered in rhinestones, tapshoes, and bare, hairy arms.
Widening the bandwidth of what it means to be a man.
Yes, why can& #39;t men wear dresses? Why can& #39;t men present as they like, without having to label themselves?
Expressing the feminine side of his male self.
"Their hope is that what they do today, other men may do after."
I think six different men were interviewed for this article, all of them clear they were male, all of them confident that it was their right to express themselves through clothing and make up traditionally associated with women.
How did we lose our way with this? Men were wearing make up right through the 70s and into the 80s, and all right, some people were silly about it because it defied patriarchal norms, but it was still a pretty visible trend.
We& #39;re 45 years on, and gender stereotyping has become more and more rigid. Progress stopped and we& #39;ve regressed. It& #39;s a damn shame.
I am continuing this #VintageMagTweets thread now about Nova magazine 1975. However, first I& #39;ll share something a friend sent me today. I don& #39;t know where it came from but two of these men are clearly twits.
OK, back to the magazine. The writer of this letter makes a good point, but what does she mean by the "literacy of the magazine"?
Headline for an article about a woman artist. Sigh.
I couldn& #39;t resist including this snippet.
Article on being a & #39;housewife& #39;. Apparently, even if a woman has help, the running of the home is always her responsibility.
Women working almost twice the number of hours the unions fought for.
As early as 1975, a mother spots gender programming.
Schools need to tell girls they have other routes they can follow.
This is a woman talking about her daily routine. Stephen is her toddler and the friend downstairs lives in a separate flat. What she& #39;s saying is, she regularly leaves her 3 year old on his own while she does the school run.
The fact she& #39;s happy to tell a magazine about this shows how socially acceptable it was to do this.
This comment shows how some women also buy into sexism, even when it harms them. Goodness knows what she means by "a bit funny."
And here& #39;s another woman essentially saying the same thing. It& #39;s not "natural" for a man to stay at home. "Masculine" men need jobs outside the house.
I hadn& #39;t thought of this, but it makes sense. By having laws that make women financially dependent on their husbands, they are saying husbands have a legal right to expect domestic work from their wives.
And in 1975, there was no law against marital rape, so that was a man& #39;s right to take from his wife too.
What women themselves can do to help address domestic inequality.
(the second half of that cutting.)
It& #39;s time to add some more to the Nova magazine thread. #VintageMagTweets In this article, the editor rounds up some of the notable women of 1975.
Three impressive firsts.
There was vast opposition to women driving buses. I have several cuttings on the subject.
What I love about these lists is the diversity of areas. Women were breaking through on so many different fronts.
First women road sweepers. Female jockeys who resoundingly beat men.
An early mention of Verity Lambert.
I didn& #39;t know this about Sue Lawley.
First female locomotive engineer.
But even Nova doesn& #39;t know her actual name and can& #39;t resist tagging her as "mother".
But even Nova doesn& #39;t know her actual name and can& #39;t resist tagging her as "mother".
And in fact women tag themselves the same way. This is an amazing bio.
This section is about sexist reporting.
For decades, newspapers have invited us to grade the relative worthiness of female victims of sexual violence.
Being female, and living in NI, both count as "emotional problems".
Nurses referred to as dolls. Demeaning for the women and dismissive of the men.
Penelope Lively - Penelope Lively! - downgraded to "don& #39;s wife".
A reminder that, till pretty recently, topless women in daily newspapers used to be standard fare.
Confused journalist.
Newpapers still reduce female MPs to & #39;how they wear their hair and clothing& #39;. But it was really blatant in the 70s.
OK, that will do for now. More on Sunday.
Here& #39;s another batch of clippings about either noteworthy women or noteworthy sexism from that year.
In Eire it was still illegal at this time for even married couples to use contraception.
To put this in context, the Equal Rights Act was passed in 1975 and began to be enforced in 1976. Companies were supposed to be getting ready for the new law.
However, as we know, many of them ignored the Act or put into place a variety of dodges to try and maintain unequal wages.
Sexism at every level.
(I wonder what the proportions are nowadays?)
Married men often got tax and workplace advantages in this country as well. In fact it was written into the UK Equality Act that they should continue to do so.
And the flip side was that there were a myriad ways in which married women lost out financially (because they were legally assessed as dependents). These women who lost their college places would almost certainly have earned less in their careers as a result. #WASPI
Airlines were possibly the most sexist advertisers of all, and there was some fierce competition.
"Let your wife".
It& #39;s astonishing, the range of products which manage to be crassly sexist.
"Eh" indeed.
Imagine, though, a generation of men who simply liked women& #39;s bodies for how they were.
Some people think if you work among other women you can be stinky because it doesn& #39;t matter.
(I& #39;m sure nobody actually thought that.)
Anorexia is caused by belligerent feminists.
Ah, Enoch Powell. Thinks nurses - who he assumes are female - don& #39;t need to be paid properly because they can always marry well.
Did you think you liked Cary Grant?
And we& #39;ll finish with Paul Raymond, owner of porn mags and strip clubs.
Here is the delightful man himself.
More on this thread on Thursday.
