In 1962, the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill. I would submit that that’s one of the four or five most transformative technological changes of the last millennium. Not just the last century. Because for the first time in the history of the world, half the people on Earth no longer have to depend on the other half for the arc of their lives.
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Generally people don’t see the skirmishes that are always always always going on in the background to preserve where we are now in terms of laws against sex discrimination or laws that would promote sex equality. But compared to where we were when the ERA came out of Congress in 1972, we are very much better off in terms of equality of rights being guaranteed by the law, because so many laws that did discriminate on their face are off the books as a result of the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment.