Young people are taught  that women before 1970 or so were suppressed, deprived of education and legally raped by their husbands. But I'm telling you that's false. My mom, her friends, and many other women I knew were not dupes, weaklings, and victims. Whoever wishes to can hate me for this, but I was there and I know what I saw… and I will defend the women I loved.

What I Know And You May Not

Yes, women have been mistreated over the centuries and still are. But that doesn't mean that abusing women was acceptable before 1970.

Were some wives treated badly? Of course. Women have been mis-treated over all of human history, but so have men and children too. We have large human problems to fix, and they manifest themselves all across the human spectrum.

I lived through the housewife era. I knew a significant number of such women… women whose births stretched back into the 1870s. So, I had a lot of direct experience. What I'm writing here concerns what I personally saw and experienced. Here are some essential points:

They were generally not forbidden an education.

Forbidding education was and remains a despicable thing. It's that way in Afghanistan, but it wasn't that way in America between 1900 and 1970. Boys and girls had fairly equal access to grammar school and high school. I don't think I knew any housewife who hadn't graduated high school. Furthermore, there were literally hundreds of women's colleges. My mom went to one; so did many other women. One of my aunts, born in the 1890s, was a highly successful lawyer. There were indeed cases of denial, such as those Emmy Noether had to overcome, but it wasn't all oppression and evil, as the narrative maintains.

Women like my mom wouldn't have stood for outright exclusion. These were intelligent housewives with the ability to carve out some free time… they could be a powerful force if someone or something got them angry.

They voted.

Prior to 1920 voting was forbidden to women in some US states, but many others, especially in the west, had long allowed women to vote. In 1920 it was mandated for all women in all states. My mother could vote as soon as she came of age, as could my grandmothers.

They were economically essential

Before I get to details, allow me to dispense with the theory that a lack of "economic value" (that is, a monetary income) made women powerless creatures who could be tormented without recourse. That theory rests on a Marxist lunacy that a single kind of power – the mere possession of dollars – dictates who can abuse whom.

Bypassing the false and insulting assumptions implied by that belief, you can check it by finding an anarcho-capitalist or a voluntaryist – the purest of free-market capitalists – and ask if they think only monetary transactions matter. They'll look at you like you're nuts.