“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicyle (?)”
A button from the Women’s Rights Movement during the 1970s.
Among the artifacts related to the Women’s Rights Movement, there are some particulartly interesting buttons belonging to the Anne Olson’s papers. They show a huge variety of slogans and mottoes: from the classical ones about the women’s right to vote and to have a say in every aspect of their lives — especially when it comes to sexual matters or the controversial issue of abortion — to more provocative and ingenious ones — as the ones which focus their attention on the physical and biological basis of men’s discrimination of women. One of the most interesting button is the one reproduced in the photograph, in which the image of a fish riding a bicycle accompanies the slogan “A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE.”
The irony hiding behind this nonsense is well portrayed by the question mark in the bubble above the fish, and it refers to the nonsensical reasons on which men based their beliefs that women were to be considered inferior. In this specific case, the vignette refers to the idea that a woman does not necessarily need a man in order to live her life at its best. Of course, men did not believe that it was possible for women to escape the control fathers and husbands had always had on their lives. This is the main reason why women had to fight so hard to be granted their own civil rights, as up to a certain point they were not even considered human beings, but inferior creatures who were only necessary as far as procreation was concerned. In order to have children, then, women needed a husband. But what happened to those women who did not want a husband? Or to those who were abandoned by the men they married?
“There is nothing to do but mill around wards or sprawl on the floor.”
(From the newspaper caption on print verso).
Women’s ward, Milledgeville State Hospital, Milledgeville, Georgia, February 28, 1971.
During the 1970s — the same decade in which Anne Olson and others female activists were fighiting for women’s civil rights — many women were closed in mental hospitals such as the Milledgeville State Hospital, in Milledgeville, Georgia. As portrayed in this 1971 photograph, the conditions in which women — but in general all the patients — were living in this kind of institutions were appalling, and far from being respectful of a person’s civil and human rights. As far as the Milledgeville State Hospital is concerned, the institution had an infamous reputation, and one of the most shocking things about this place is the fact that for a long time it used to admit women as patients for the only reason that they were not married — either because they never got married, or because their husbands died or deserted them.
At that time — and for decades before then — it was not considered socially acceptable nor respectable for a woman to live on her own, and therefore many were interned in such institutions. Of course, it is possible that some of them really suffered from mental disorder, but somehow it is hard to believe that prejudices of this kind did not play a part in the internment of single women just because of their coniugal status. As Laurie Jane Varner reports in the appendix of her “Gone to Milledgeville”: Northeast Georgia Women and the Georgia State Sanitarium, 1888–1936 (2011), the doctors used to point out on the patients’ record whenever a particular woman had started suffering from mental illness the moment her husband left. To a great part of society back then, this was another proof of the fact that a woman could not live without a man, and, therefore, that they could not be granted equal rights.
