The stereotypical gender “norms” of the early 1900s are largely different than the current times.

As of 2022, about 91.8 percent of women graduated high school or had a higher education degree in the United States. This is a 49.3 percent increase from the 1960s, when only 42.5 percent of women in the United States graduated high school according to Veera Korhonen.

During the first and second World Wars, many men were in the military and no longer able to work in manufacturing. Because of this and the increasing demands for war materials, production laboring jobs opened up to women.

Additionally in the late 1930s to 1940s, after the stock market crash and fall of the economy left many college students suffering, women, particularly at the University of Washington, rallied together and started questioning the limited roles and opportunities that were available for them.

Due to the limited number of jobs available for the population, the majority of men were unlikely candidates for marriage. This led women to be more concerned about their own education in order to support themselves in the future according to Flannery.

“For the first time, women were being encouraged to act in their own self-interest in terms of their education, and to abandon their stereotypical role as a docile student,” says Flannery.

During the Great Depression, female interest and participation in sports started to gradually increase around the same time that women began expanding their academic involvement according to Washington University writer Nicolette Flannery.

Women at the University of Washington were particularly involved in swimming, both competitive and intramural. Female students saw overcrowding in the women’s pool due to the rising popularity of the event and the limited hours of operation at the women’s pool.

Gay O’Neill saw similar things during her education at North in the late 1960s. She is a current substitute and previous teacher at Omaha North High School. She taught pottery, advanced painting and drawing and jewelry making during her 15 years teaching at North.

At the time, North did not offer athletics for girls, except for a “swim team” that only had three meets.

“We were told that we couldn’t keep score because it was unlady like,” said O’Neill

Although women were gaining more opportunities to further their education, physically and mentally outside of high school, they were still underrepresented as both students and staff members in the 1950s. Some higher education schools put restrictive quotas on how many women could be accepted or banned them entirely according to National Geographic.

“Now, girls are looked at as being more equal to boys, people don’t question that intelligence levels can be the same,” said O’Neill.

The most common working positions for women in the 1950s were as secretaries, bank tellers, salesclerks, and teachers while the men that had jobs were mechanics and repairmen according to Ancestry and The Week.

When O’Neill was still a student at North, in terms of fashion, girls were expected to wear dresses and skirts every day. The dress code was so strict that at one point, O’Neill was sent home due to her skirt.

For women in the United States, the flowy, feminine fashions that were common in the 1950s have all but disappeared and are reserved mainly for special occasions, if at all, according to The Casual Dress of the 1950s Woman and the Casual Dress of Today’s Woman.

The everyday style of women in 2019 was significantly more casual than in the 1950s, as pants, shorts, and leggings have become more common over dresses and skirts. Although dresses are still worn by women from time to time, these dresses are considerably different, in terms of general style, than the dresses worn in the 1950s.

“But make no mistake, there’s still a huge glass ceiling,” said O’Neill. In other words, O’Neill believes gender equality in schools still has a long way to go.

As stated by O’Neill, “it takes a while for the world to change.”