Born a Woman

Singer Sandy Posey, circa 1966
People are distillers of information, with anything meaty getting cooked-down to its bare bones.
Nowhere is this more true than in our understanding of history – even recent history.
Entire decades of events, trends, and changes are reduced to a shortlist of manageable icons and symbols.
Take the 1960s USA.
Ask anyone who wasn’t alive at the time to offer up a summary, and it’s a pretty good bet that they would mention hippies and flower power, the moon landing, Civil Rights marches and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
And yet, most of the events seen as being quintessentially “60s” actually took place at the tail end of the 1960s and during the first half of the 1970s.
The USA remained in many ways a deeply conservative and profoundly patriarchal society throughout much of the 1960s, with the majority of married women (especially those from the working- and middle classes) expected to bear and care for children, have a meal ready for “the man of the house” when he arrived home from work, and to put constant effort into making themselves attractive.
The great majority of single women were actively seeking a suitable husband, and most job opportunities open to single women were often found in non-fulfilling or low-paying employment as telephone operators, factory workers, secretaries, nurses, and other jobs in which they played a supporting role to supervisors, businessmen, doctors, and other professional men.
Married women spent hours scrubbing, changing diapers, doing the laundry, peeling potatoes, vacuuming or mopping floors, washing windows, and ironing.
Women (both single and married) also spent hours back-combing or “ratting” their hair, wearing curlers, applying copious amounts of hair spray, painting nails, and sitting under hair dryers in beauty salons.
Life outside the home for many married women involved little more than shopping, going for a weekend drive, or “dressing-up” and going out dancing in cocktail lounges and nightclubs with their husbands on Friday nights.
“Women’s Lib” and the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) campaigns wouldn’t hit hard until the 1970s.
In hindsight, it seems almost certain that the single biggest thing to hit American society during the late 1960s and early 1970s had nothing to do with Nixon and Watergate, Vietnam, or hippies.
That massive thing was The Pill.
The Pill only became available to married couples in 1965.
The Pill only became available to single women in 1972.
To the great shock and horror of many males, it became apparent that women enjoyed sex just as much as men.
Women being able to have a sex life both inside and outside of marriage, free from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, removed one of the greatest obstacles to female agency and independence.
Suddenly, many more married women wanted a job outside the home, sick of asking their husbands for pocket money.
There were fights and arguments in houses all over the USA, as certain types of men saw their traditional roles (and means of asserting control) eroding from under their feet.
“My wife could leave me, if she isn’t depending on my money. My wife could easily have an affair now, and GET AWAY WITH IT.”
There are undoubtedly still many men who would like to regain the control over women’s bodies that was lost in the 1960s and 1970s.
So the next time you hear the 1960s described as all hippies and flower power, remember that Woodstock was in 1969, and only a tiny percentage of kids were well-off enough to travel around in a VW microbus, following bands like The Grateful Dead.
Counter-culture bands were a niche interest until their wider breakout in 1967.
You will not find songs by Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Santana, Arthur Lee‘s “Love“, or even The Beatles among the Top 30 selling singles of 1966.
You WILL find songs by ? and the Mysterians, The Monkees, Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, Nancy Sinatra, and Barry Sadler singing “The Ballad of the Green Berets“.
And the most important pharmaceutical of the era wasn’t LSD, it was a little pill containing progestin and estrogen.
*****
Post script
A girl from Alabama named Sandy Posey passed away this summer just gone.
Millions upon millions of people have heard her singing backing vocals on fellow Alabamian Percy Sledge‘s smash 1966 soul hit “When a Man Loves a Woman“.
Probably fewer people remember Posey’s own mega-hits from 1966 – “Single Girl” and “Born a Woman“, both written by Martha Sharp.
These two songs perfectly encapsulate the world of many American women during the mid-1960s, as they tried to reconcile and balance traditional gender roles with glimpses of greater possibilities just over the horizon.
The lyrics to “Born a Woman” illustrate this conflict between two worlds, hovering somewhere between proto-feminist critique and acquiescence.
Sandy Posey would later become “born again” – largely withdrawing from music recording and going on to marry an Elvis impersonator. We make our choices.
It’s a good pop song, whatever the case.
It makes no difference
If you’re rich or poor
Or if you’re smart or dumb
A woman’s place in this old world
Is under some man’s thumb
And if you’re born a woman
You’re born to be hurt
You’re born to be stepped on
Lied to, cheated on
And treated like dirt
Ah, if you’re born a woman
You’re born to be hurt
A woman’s lot
is to give and give
And go on giving
A woman’s got to love and lose
And go on living
Well, I was born a woman
I didn’t have no say
And when my man finally comes home
He makes me glad it happened that way
Because to be his woman
No price is too great to pay
Yes, I was born a woman
I’m glad it happened that way
Oh, I was born a woman
I’m glad it happened that way
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