Comment by pseudohadamard

Even then things were pretty dire. Talking to female relatives who grew up in Europe in the early 1950s, for girls your life path was to go to school until the age of 13 or 14 (no point in educating a girl past that age, why do they need an education) after which your future was either domestic servant/baby machine or, for a select few, school teacher or nurse. That was it. That was your life prospects. You often couldn't vote, couldn't drive, and needed to get your husband's permission for various things that we take for granted today. The only thing missing was a burqa.