“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Photo Satirically Mocks Every Vice & Sin Censored by the Hays Movie Censorship Code

in Film | September 24th, 2019

The history of Hollywood film before 1968 breaks down into two eras: “pre-Code” and “post-Code.” The “Code” in question is the Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the “Hays Code,” a reference to Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America president Will H. Hays. The organization we now know as the MPAA hired Hays in 1922, tasking the Presbyterian deacon and former chairman of the Republican National Committee and Postmaster General with “cleaning up” early Hollywood’s sinful image. Eight years into Hays’ presidency came the Code, a pre-emptive act of self-censorship meant to dictate the morally acceptable — and more importantly, the morally unacceptable — content in American film.

“The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers,” NPR’s Bob Mondello quotes Hays as saying at the Code’s 1930 debut. “It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment.” No picture, for example, should “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” and “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” There was also “an updated, much-expanded list of ‘don’ts’ and ‘be carefuls,’ with bans on nudity, suggestive dancing and lustful kissing. The mocking of religion and the depiction of illegal drug use were prohibited, as were interracial romance, revenge plots and the showing of a crime method clearly enough that it might be imitated.”

Serious enforcement of the Code commenced in 1934, and it didn’t take long thereafter for Hollywood filmmakers to start flouting it. “American film producers are inured by now to the Hays Office which regulates movie morals,” says a Life article from 1946. Indeed, “knowing that things banned by the code will help sell tickets,” those producers “have been subtly getting around the code for years.” In other words, they “observe its letter and violate its spirit as much as possible.” Atop the article appears an enormous photograph, taken by Paramount photographer A. L. “Whitey” Schafer, that “shows, in one fell swoop, many things producers must not do,” or rather must not depict: the defeat of the law, the inside of the thigh, narcotics, drinking, an “exposed bosom,” a tommy gun, and so on.

For 1941’s inaugural Hollywood Studios’ Still Show, “Schafer decided to create a novelty shot to satirically slap at the Production Code, the censorship standards of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Assn,” writes Hollywood historian Mary Mallory. “His satirical image, entitled, “Thou Shalt Not,” displayed the top 10 faux-pas disallowed by industry censors, who approved every photographic image shot by studios before they could be distributed.” When “outraged organizers pulled the image from the competition” and threatened Schaefer with a fine, he explained that “all the judges were hoarding the 18 prints submitted for the show.” Few of us today would feel so titillated, let alone morally corrupted, by Schafer’s image, but as filmmaker Aislinn Clarke recently demonstrated on Twitter, it may offer more pure entertainment value than ever.

(via @AislinnClarke)

The 5 Essential Rules of Film Noir

The Essential Elements of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Infographic

When Stanley Kubrick Banned His Own Film, A Clockwork Orange: It Was the “Most Effective Censorship of a Film in British History”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Brief History of the Great American Road Trip

in History, Travel | September 24th, 2019

I live in Asia, where no few people express an interest in traveling to my homeland, the United States of America. When I meet such people, I always give them the same advice: if you go, make sure to take a cross-country road trip. But then I would say that, at least according to the premise of the PBS Idea Channel video above, “Why Do Americans Love Road Trips?” While driving from New York to Louisville, Nashville, and then Philadelphia, host Mike Rugnetta theorizes about the connection between the road trip and the very concept of America. It begins with physical suitability, what with the U.S.’ relatively low gas prices, amenable terrain, and sheer size: “America is big,” Rugnetta points out. “Some might say too big.”

As Rugnetta drives farther, he goes deeper: for quite a long stretch of U.S. history, “progress and mobility were peas in a pod, and mobility has always been a subtext of America’s favorite societal bulwark, freedom.” In other words, “America’s idea of its own awesomeness” — and does any word more clearly mark modern American speech? — “is very much built on metaphors having to do with movement.”

In the 20th century, movement came to mean cars, especially as the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1950s came around, at which time President Eisenhower, “inspired by the awesome system of roads he saw in Germany,” authorized the construction of a national highway system, the replacement for storied but non-comprehensive interstate roads like Route 66.

From then on, the United States saw an enormous surge in both car ownership, auto-industry employment, “the middle class, suburbia, fast food,” and a host of other phenomena still seen as characteristically American. “To say that modern America was built both by and for the car,” as Rugnetta puts it, “would not be an insane overstatement.” But he also notes that the idea of the road trip itself goes back to 1880s Germany, when Bertha Benz, wife of Benz Moterwagen founder Karl Benz, took her husband’s then-experimental car on a then-illegal 66-mile drive through the countryside. The first American road trip was taken in 1903 by a doctor named Horatio Jackson and, as the Rough Guides video above tells it, involved a bet, a dog, and — the whole way from San Francisco to New York — no signage at all.

Rugnetta also presents a philosophical question, derived from the Sorites Paradox: at what point does a “drive” turn into a “road trip?” Does it take a certain number of miles, of gas-tank refills, of roadside attractions? A coast-to-coast drive of the kind pioneered by Jackson unquestionably qualifies as a road trip. So does the automobile journey taken by Dutchman Henny Hogenbijl in the summer of 1955, his color film of which you can see above. Beginning with footage of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, New World Symphony shows off the sights Hogenbijl saw while driving from New York to Los Angeles, with places like Niagara Falls, Chicago, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park, and Salt Lake City as the stops in between — or the places, to use the phrase Rugnetta credits with great importance in American myth, Hogenbijl was just “passin’ through.”

Not long ago, a modern-day Hogenbijl made that great American road trip with the destinations reversed. Like Hogenbijl, he filmed it; unlike Hogenbijl, he filmed not the stops but the driving itself, and every single minute it took him to get across the United States at that. Lucky for the busy viewer, the video compresses this eight days of footage into a mere seven hours, adding an indicator of the state being passed through in the lower-left corner of the frame. Even sped up, the viewing experience underscores a point I try to make to all the hopeful road-trippers I meet on this side of the world: you must drive across America not just to experience how interesting the country is, but at the same time how boring it is. Allow me one use that most characteristically American locution when I say that both America’s interestingness and its boringness, as well as its many other qualities best seen on the road, inspire awe — that is, they’re awesome.

If You Drive Down a Stretch of Route 66, the Road Will Play “America the Beautiful”

12 Classic Literary Road Trips in One Handy Interactive Map

Four Interactive Maps Immortalize the Road Trips That Inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Download Digitized Copies of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Sex Pistols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Concerts in Dallas, Memphis, Tulsa & More

in Music | September 23rd, 2019

The Sex Pistols “started out as an elaborate Situationist-inspired performance art piece dreamed up by megalomaniac manager Malcolm McLaren,” wrote Jonathan Crow in a post here at Open Culture about one of the band’s storied, disastrous final shows in Dallas of 1978. After beginning as the creation of McLaren and partner Vivienne Westwood, however, they “evolved beyond just being a stunt.”

The statement is objectively true by music history standards. The band’s earliest gigs were directly responsible for almost every major band that took British punk in subsequent post-punk, goth, new wave, dub, etc. directions, including the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, Joy Division, Wire, and too many others to list.

Later came the hugely influential post-punk of John Lydon’s (formerly Rotten) own project, Public Image Limited, which reflected his serious interest in making experimental, cerebral, music with oblique lyrics deriving as much from symbolist poetry as the “deep simmering well of cultural discontent” he’d tapped into with the Pistols.

Lydon retired the character of Johnny Rotten when the band broke up at the end of their first and last U.S. tour, famously ending things at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom by sneering “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”—a bitter comment on the band’s collapse, its very existence, and a press and audience willing to buy the act. No matter how influential they may have been, the Sex Pistols’ architects always maintained they were a cynical prank to the end.

The “one-time hippie haven of the Winterland in San Francisco,” as Ultimate Classic Rock describes it, may have been the perfect venue for their demise, a final screw you to the self-satisfied 60s rock culture Rotten loathed. But it was their tour through Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, Tulsa and the formerly Jack Ruby-owned Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas that made the most press, just as McLaren had designed it to do, booking country & western venues expressly to provoke, enrage, and scandalize.

Rotten had more complicated feelings about what would become a series of violent spectacles. He seemed half in on the joke, and half hoping that “real people” outside of coastal cities would become real fans. “We’re playing these cities because these are the people who will either accept us or hate us,” he said at the time. “They’re not as pretentious as they are in New York.”

He maintained in his autobiography that McLaren had also foreseen the U.S. tour as savvy marketing. “It wasn’t a question of throwing the band to the wolves when we chose to just play the South…. We felt that if we were ever going to be taken seriously in America, it would be from a base we built down south. The cowboys seemed to take it for the joke it was meant to be. We weren’t there to destroy their way of life or anything like that.”

Of course, he must have seen the U.S. press accuse the band of doing just that before their arrival—corrupting the youth, etc. Did he really hope for a warmer welcome from “the cowboys”? Was it all the glorious train wreck everyone thinks it was? Reports from eyewitnesses vary widely, as Altpress and The Dallas Morning News point out, with some expressing serious disappointment and others awe. Noel Monk’s book 12 Days on the Road describes “outrageous behavior, and concerts that frequently degenerated into near-riots.”

You can see for yourself what those unprecedented, at the time, shows looked and sounded like in the recordings here from the entire seven-city run. (Begun after a cancelled December 1977 gig in Pittsburgh). At the top we have “Anarchy in the U.K.” from the January 1978 tour opener in Atlanta; then audio of the entire show in Memphis days later; film from Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio (in which Sid Vicious hits a fan with his bass); audio of the Baton Rouge concert; film of the entire performance at the Longhorn; film from Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, OK, with audio from the Winterland finale, and, finally, the Winterland itself.

After their flame-out in the first month of 1978, and Sid’s alleged murder of Nancy Spungeon and his overdose and death, John Lydon “claimed the Pistols had ‘killed’ rock and roll,” notes the site Randy’s Rodeo (named for the riotous Texas show further up). The whole tour “was a perverse, provocative joke.” McLaren’s “intent was not to sell tickets, but to incite controversy and mayhem.” The band, fractious, burned out, and eager to escape McLaren’s machinations, would have been more than happy to make some money for their trouble. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Watch the Sex Pistols’ Very Last Concert (San Francisco, 1978)

Malcolm McLaren: The Quest for Authentic Creativity

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

How Bicycles Can Revolutionize Our Lives: Case Studies from the United States, Netherlands, China & Britain

in Current Affairs, Design, Health, Life | September 23rd, 2019

A two- (and three- and one-) wheeled revolution is upon us. Dubbed “micro-mobility” by start-up marketers and influencers, the trend incorporates all sorts of personal means of transport. While the buzz may hover around electric scooters and skateboards, the faithful bicycle still leads the pack, as it has for over a hundred years. And advocates—who bike as their primary means of exercise, commuting, and running daily errands—are challenging the orthodoxies of car culture.

As an avid cyclist myself, who bikes as often as I can for groceries and other errands, I will admit to a strong bias in their favor. But even I’ve been challenged and surprised by what I’ve learned from biking advocates like Liz Canning, producer and narrator of a new documentary film, Motherload, a portrait of the many people who have chosen to use cargo bikes instead of cars for nearly everything.

The film is remarkable for the ordinariness of its subjects. As one cargo cyclist, Brent Patterson of Buffalo, New York, says, “I’m not an athlete. I’m not superhuman. I’m just a completely normal person like you.” The Patterson family “sold its car,” notes Outside magazine, “and travels by cargo bike year-round, even in snowstorms.” Another cargo cyclist in the film, Emily Finch, “carts all six of her kiddos around on two wheels.” We see cargo cyclists around the world, using bikes as emergency transport haulers and daily grocery-getters.

Most of the Americans profiled live in bike-friendly communities like Marin County, California or Portland, Oregon. But others, like the Pattersons, do not, “and not all are as comfortably off as Canning,” who retired as a commercial filmmaker to raise her kids in bike-friendly Fairfax, CA. “Some had to sell their car or take out a no-interest loan in order to afford a cargo bike.” No one seems to have regretted the decision.

Readers who hail from, or have lived in, places in the world where bike-reliance is the norm may scoff at the presumed novelty of the idea in Canning’s film. But at one time, even the Netherlands—home of the ubiquitous Bakfiets—was almost as car-centric as most of the U.S., as American Dan Kois writes in a New Yorker essay about how he learned to become bike commuter in the Netherlands.

I had assumed that Dutch people’s adeptness at biking was the result of generations of incessant cycling. In fact, after the Second World War, the Netherlands had, like the U.S., become dominated by cars. Cycling paths were overtaken by roads, and neighborhoods in Amsterdam were razed to make room for highways. Between 1950 and 1970, the number of cars in the country exploded from about a hundred thousand to nearly two and a half million. During that same period, bike use plummeted; in Amsterdam, the percentage of trips made by bike fell from eighty to twenty.

That all changed when young activists and parents, especially mothers—like the biking mothers in Motherload—began protesting high numbers of traffic deaths. They took to the streets on their bikes, blocking traffic, running for office, and pressuring city officials to make infrastructure and public space safe and accommodating for bikes. Now, there are more bikes than people in the Netherlands, and cars co-exist on roads full of cyclists of all ages and classes, on their way to work, school, and everywhere else.

Dutch drivers “look out for cyclists,” writes Kois. “After all, nearly all of those drivers are cyclists themselves,” using the car for a brief, necessary outing before they get back on their bikes for most everything else. Next to Kois’ first-person account of his few-months-long sojourn through Delft, we have the global testimony of the Bicycle Architecture Biennale, a “showcase of cutting edge and high profile building designs that are facilitating bicycle travel and transforming communities around the world.” The exhibits, writes Karen Wong at David Byrne’s Reasons to Be Cheerful, “point the way to a two-wheeled utopia.”

BYCS, the group responsible for this well-curated exhibition, come from Amsterdam. The projects they feature, however, are in London and Chongmin and Chengdu, China. The cargo cyclists in Motherload, and the ferocious activism of cyclists in places like New York City, despite tremendous “bikelash,” may show Americans they don’t need to look abroad to see how bikes could slowly displace cars as Americans’ vehicles of choice in some parts of the country. But learning from how other places have reimagined their infrastructure could prove necessary for lasting change.

Many Americans cannot imagine life without their cars, even if they also have garages full of bikes. Some lash out at cyclists as a threat to their way of life. The country is enormous (though we do most driving locally); cars serve as modes of transport—for human, plant, animal, and everything else—and also as escape pods and status symbols. Canning’s film shows us ordinary American men and women getting the gumption to trade some comfort and security for lives of minor adventure and ecological simplicity. (And a good many of them still have cars if they need them.)

We also see, in exhibitions like that previewed in the video above how design principles and policy can help make such choices easier and safer for everyone to make. Canning pointedly frames her argument in Motherload around cycling’s radical history. “100 years before the bicycle saved me,” she says in the film’s official trailer at the top, “it liberated the poor, empowered the suffragettes, and transformed society faster than any invention in human history. It could happen again.”

via Outside

The Art & Science of Bike Design: A 5‑Part Introduction from the Open University

How Leo Tolstoy Learned to Ride a Bike at 67, and Other Tales of Lifelong Learning

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Make an Adorable Crocheted Freddie Mercury; Download a Free Crochet Pattern Online

in Creativity, How to Learn for Free, Music | September 23rd, 2019

Given his passion for his pussycats, is it really such a stretch to imagine Queen frontman Freddie Mercury passing a quiet evening at home with a cup of tea and a basket of crochet supplies?

Tis but a handicrafter’s fantasy.

Other than a boyish interest in stamp collecting, Mercury claimed to have no hobbies, famously telling an interviewer who inquired, “I have none. I have a lot of sex. Try and get out of that one!”

Which is not to say sex and crochet are mutually exclusive.

If your crochet notions are rooted in frumpy afghans, lumpy baby sweaters, and 1970s beer can hats, you need to get with the times and picture a church bazaar populated exclusively by sexy woolen Mercurys in miniature facsimiles of his Wembley Stadium era garb.

Moji-Moji Design’s Janice Holmes, a self-taught expert in amigurumi, the art of tiny crocheted creatures, devised the pattern in order to stitch up a special request for a Queen-loving friend.

The result, complete with hairy chest, jacket buckles, and a bamboo skewer mic stand, was so fabulous that she felt compelled to share the pattern with the world, in hope that those who took advantage of the free download would consider donating to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, a charity that bandmates Brian May and Roger Taylor and Queen manager Jim Beach founded to fight HIV/AIDS worldwide.

Those who braved the tricky, many-stepped pattern were invited to share photos of their final creation on Moji-Moji’s Facebook page. As of last count, there are 21, and it’s fascinating to note the slight variations in eyes, mustache, and chest hair.

In keeping with amigurumi tradition, the affordable patterns in Moji-Moji’s Etsy shop run toward cute animals, cuddly monsters, and seasonal favorites like witches and elves.

But Freddie clearly stirred something up. Read the comments and you’ll find crafters petitioning Holmes for more music icons like David Bowie and Prince.

Ready to snuggle up with a crochet hook? Download Moji-Moji’s free Freddie Mercury amigarumi pattern here.

If that’s rather too daunting, ease into the craftiness with another free download—Lady Lazybones’ far less advanced foldable cubecraft Freddie.

Even if you plan on sticking with sex as your sole hobby, please consider making a voluntary contribution to the Mercury Phoenix Trust here.

via Boing Boing

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Freddie Mercury’s Final Video Performance

Freddie Mercury Reimagined as Comic Book Heroes

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, October 7 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates the art of Aubrey Beardsley. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Wes Anderson Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Distinctive Filmmaking Style

in Film | September 23rd, 2019

“I do feel kind of like I’ve got my own style and voice,” Wes Anderson says in the Director’s Chair profile video above. Both his fans and his critics will take that as a vast understatement. Viewers in the former group can’t get enough time in his cinematic world, built out of places, costumes, fonts, cultural artifacts, and filmmaking techniques meticulously selected and arranged; viewers in the latter group see all those things as adding up to the same film over and over again. But the man who directed Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Grand Budapest Hotel knows exactly what he’s doing, as evidenced by interviews and clips of him in action. “Whatever is coming from my imagination is inspired by my background and my own psychology,” he says. “Without me controlling it or choosing to, I’m in the movies.”

In a Studio Binder breakdown of Anderson’s style, SC Lannom encapsulates what Anderson does as “direct-directing.” In other words, “laced throughout his films are nuanced production design elements and visual gags, but executed in such a deliberate manner that the viewer always ‘catches’ these little easter eggs that inform our mood.” His audience “knows what he wants them to know,” “sees what he wants them to see,” and “feels what he wants them to feel.” The average Hollywood hack might use this directorial superpower to formulaic and cynical ends, but Anderson goes his own way. “The Wes Anderson style is Wes Anderson himself,” Lannom writes. “A hard-working, thoughtful human who is focused on his imagination. His visuals are an extension of his own psychology. Anderson is those clothes, those Zissou Adidas, those record players… those memories.”

Growing up in Texas, Anderson first dreamed of becoming an architect, then a writer. Though he has ended up devoting his life to film, those early interests in mastering space and narrative clearly never left him — nor has the porousness between imagination and reality that characterizes childhood. “Wes Anderson tells stories from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy,” Lannom writes. “More specifically, he tells stories from his perspective as a 12-year-old. His films capture the essence of a board game or story book, and the world he builds in each film resembles a snapshot from his childhood.” So do the places that constitute that world, shot in symmetrical compositions by his longtime director of photography Robert Yeoman: “Even if he is using an established location, you get the feeling that the whole place was built for the film, and that is not done by accident.”

All this makes Wes Anderson perhaps the most obvious living example of an auteur, the kind of director who, despite working with countless collaborators, nevertheless leaves an immediately recognizable aesthetic and narrative signature on all his films. Naturally, his list of influences includes many auteurs before him, like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Jean-Luc Godard. And though “learning from Anderson is one of the most important things you can do as a filmmaker,” Lannom writes, “replicating his style is one of the more questionable things you can do as a filmmaker.” Far better, in other words, to make films that reflect the various forces that have shaped you, whatever those forces may be, than to make knock-off Wes Anderson movies. And how does Wes Anderson himself regard the concept of the “Wes Anderson movie”? “The more I think about it, the more confused I get.”

via uncrate

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bottle Rocket (1992)

Wes Anderson’s Cinematic Debt to Stanley Kubrick Revealed in a Side-By-Side Comparison

How the Astonishing Sushi Scene in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Was Animated: A Time-Lapse of the Month-Long Shoot

Accidental Wes Anderson: Every Place in the World with a Wes Anderson Aesthetic Gets Documented by Reddit

Wes Anderson Movie Sets Recreated in Cute, Miniature Dioramas

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Coddling of the American Mind: Malcolm Gladwell Leads a Conversation with Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff & Lenore Skenazy

in Education, Life | September 23rd, 2019

From the 92nd Street Y in New York City comes a wide-ranging conversation featuring Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Haidt (NYU), Greg Lukianoff (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), and Lenore Skenazy (founder of the Free-Range Kids movement). Here’s a quick summary of the ground they cover:

Civil discourse is in decline, with potentially dire results for American democracy.

On college campuses across America, visiting speakers are disinvited, or even shouted down, while professors, students, and administrators are afraid to talk openly, for fear that someone will take offense. Political discussion on social media and television has devolved into a wave of hyper-partisan noise. A generation of overprotective parents are reluctant to let their children play outside without supervision. How did we get here? And how can we change the way that we engage with one another?

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind sounds the depths of this generational crisis. Join us for a lively discussion with the authors, president of the non-profit Let Grow and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement Lenore Skenazy, and #1 New York Times bestseller Malcolm Gladwell on how we as citizens can engage with one another across the political spectrum.

If it’s not already clear, the conversation is based on Lukianoff and Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Skenazy is the author of Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry). If you sign up for a free trial with Audible, you can download copies of both books.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

by Guest | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Nine Things a Woman Couldn’t Do in 1971

in Gender, History, Law, Life, Politics, Twitter | September 20th, 2019

As we barrel toward the centennial celebration of women’s suffrage in the United States, it’s not enough to bone up on the platforms of female primary candidates (though that’s an excellent start).

A Twitter user and self-described Old Crone named Robyn recently urged her fellow Americans to take a good long gander at a list of nine freedoms women in the United States were not universally granted in 1971, the year Helen Reddy released the soon-to-be anthem, “I Am Woman,” above.

Even those of us who remember singing along as children may experience some shock that these facts check out on Snopes.

CREDIT CARDS: Prior to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, married women couldn’t get credit cards without their husbands’ signatures. Single women, divorcees, and widows were often required to have a man cosign. The double standard also meant female applicants were frequently issued card limits up to 50% lower than that of males who earned identical wages.
PREGNANT WORKERS: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 protected pregnant women from being fired because of their impending maternity. But it came with a major loophole that’s still in need of closing. The language of the 41-year-old law stipulates that the employers must accommodate pregnant workers only if concessions are being made for other employees who are “similar in their ability or inability to work.”
JURY DUTY: In 1975, the Supreme Court declared it constitutionally unacceptable for states to deny women the opportunity to serve on juries. This is an arena where we’ve all come a long way, baby. It’s now completely normal for men to be excused from jury duty as the primary caregivers of their young children.
MILITARY COMBAT: In 2013, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey announced that the Pentagon was rescinding the direct combat exclusion rule that barred women from serving in artillery, armor, infantry and other such battle roles. At the time of the announcement, the military had already seen more than 130 female soldiers killed, and 800 wounded on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan.
IVY LEAGUE ADMISSIONS: Those who conceive of elite colleges as breeding grounds for sexual assault protests and Title IX activism would do well to remember that Columbia College didn’t admit women until 1983, following in the marginally deeper footsteps of others in the Ivy League—Harvard (1977), Dartmouth (1972), Brown (1971), Yale (1969), and Princeton (1969). These days, single sex higher education options for women far outnumber those for men, but the networking power and increased earning potential an Ivy League degree confers remains the same.
WORKPLACE HARASSMENT: In 1977, women who’d been sexually harassed in the workplace received confirmation in three separate trials that they could sue their employers under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex harassment was also unlawful. In between was the television event of 1991, Anita Hill’s shocking testimony against her former boss, U.S. Supreme Court justice (then nominee) Clarence Thomas.
SPOUSAL CONSENT: In 1993, spousal rape was officially outlawed in all 50 states. Not tonight honey, or you’ll have a headache in the form of your wife’s legal back up.
HEALTH INSURANCE: In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act decreed that any health insurance plan established after March of that year could not charge women higher premiums than men for identical benefits. This was bad news for women who got their health insurance through their jobs, and whose employers were grandfathered into discriminatory plans established prior to 2010. Of course, that’s all ancient history now.
CONTRACEPTIVES: In 1972, the Supreme Court made it legal for all citizens to possess birth control, irrespective of marital status, stating “if the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” (It’s worth noting, however, that in 1972, states could still constitutionally prohibit and punish sex outside of marriage.)

Feminism is NOT just for other women.

- Old Crone

Via Kottke

MAKERS Tells the Story of 50 Years of Progress for Women in the U.S.

Women’s Hidden Contributions to Modern Genetics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Footnotes

A Space of Their Own, a New Online Database, Will Feature Works by 600+ Overlooked Female Artists from the 15th-19th Centuries

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC on Monday, October 7 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domaincelebrates the art of Aubrey Beardsley. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 17 ) |

“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Photo Satirically Mocks Every Vice & Sin Censored by the Hays Movie Censorship Code

A Brief History of the Great American Road Trip

The Sex Pistols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Concerts in Dallas, Memphis, Tulsa & More

How Bicycles Can Revolutionize Our Lives: Case Studies from the United States, Netherlands, China & Britain

Make an Adorable Crocheted Freddie Mercury; Download a Free Crochet Pattern Online

Wes Anderson Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Distinctive Filmmaking Style

The Coddling of the American Mind: Malcolm Gladwell Leads a Conversation with Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff & Lenore Skenazy

Nine Things a Woman Couldn’t Do in 1971

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search