It’s not been an easy road for women, and some of the things that are taken for granted haven’t always been so normal.
Not too long ago it would have been impossible for females to vote, go to university or even to continue working after marriage.
But there are some even stranger things that women have been banned from doing over the years…
Throw on a guernsey
After all the men cleared out of England to fight in World War I, women stepped in to lots of jobs that had traditionally been filled by their male counterparts.
The sporting world was not exempt.
All-female football teams became a public sensation, and could often attract 50,000-strong crowds.
But, when the war finished and the men returned, doctors advised the Football League that football was “unsuitable” for the fairer sex.
So female teams were banned from male teams’ sporting grounds until 1971.
Check out the Olympic Games
It wasn’t just football that was deemed unsuitable for ladies.
The ancient Greeks banned married women from attending as spectators at, let alone participating in, their Olympic Games.
Defiance to the rule was punishable by death.
The English got involved too, when the British army banned women from watching boxing matches.
Not even the prizefighter’s wife could attend, on the premise that boxing was not “an edifying spectacle.”
Light up outside
It’s fairly common now for smoking to be banned in public places, but New York City singled out its female inhabitants when it banned them from smoking in public businesses in 1908.
Rumour has it that one pioneering feminist complained to the media about double standards when she was brought up on charges for daring to light up on the street, but the law wasn’t appealed until 1927.
Use contraceptives
Until a Supreme Court ruling in 1965, it was against the law in many states for married couples to interfere with nature’s course, and contraception was a taboo subject.
But that ruling only applied to married women, and it wasn’t until 1972 that it finally became legal to distribute contraceptives to single females.
Be pregnant and still working
If you did get pregnant, maternity leave was often considered permanent in the US.
There was no obligation on employers to retain their pregnant workers until 1978, when the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed.
Before that, working women who fell pregnant had no access to benefits, and nearly 40 per cent of businesses took advantage of the lack of laws and protection for new mothers.
Have a credit card
Yes, even how women got to spend their own money wasn’t their decision to make.
Until the Senate passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, banking institutions got away with discriminating against their customers depending on their gender or marital status.
It was often necessary for a single or divorced woman to have a male co-sign their application for a credit card, and when weighing their salaries, banks would sometimes consider just half the total amount.
Break out a bikini
Even the beach was no place to show off some skin in the 1920s.
A lot of local governments prohibited women from showing too much leg, and often posted law enforcers to patrol the beach with a measuring tape to make sure standards were being upheld.
If a woman was found to be wearing an inappropriate cossie, she would be asked to change, and, if she refused, could even be arrested.
Then the beautiful Brigitte Bardot came along and was snapped in a rather revealing two-piece, and the 50s ushered in the era of the bikini.
Be a member of a jury
Did you know that women might be too sympathetic to criminals?
That’s what the American Supreme Court thought, when they made it constitutionally acceptable for courts to ban women from serving on juries in 1879.
Fifty years later, and 31 states still agreed that female jurors suffered from a “defect of sex”, and believed it was inappropriate for the delicate lady-folk to hear the gory details of criminal cases.
Thankfully, Congress stepped in in 1957, although it wasn’t until a Supreme Court decision in 1975 that the choice of excluding women from juries was taken away entirely.
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