Picture it. The South. 1980. Company had stated blatantly that they were looking to hire women because they needed token female employees, and fast. VP who interviewed me said, “I’ll hire you if you promise me that, for the next 5 years, you won’t get married, get pregnant, or go back to school for an advanced degree”.

Yes, they could ask questions like that back then. And we couldn’t object. I said, “sure!” and took the job.

Want more?

I was a steel trader. I’m tri-lingual. I was handling customers in other countries so they didn’t have to depend on, or pay, professional interpreters who weren’t employees.

In the entire company, there were only 3 women who were traders.

My department consisted of me & 2 men. We had a secretary. She’d been hired right after she’d had her 4th child. Over the months, she was proudly losing the weight she’d put on when she was pregnant. One morning, I noticed that…she looked pregnant again. I wasn’t going to say anything, because I wasn’t an idiot - I know you never ask a woman if she’s pregnant until or unless you see the baby crowning yourself.

But one morning, about a week later, she was late to work. Now, this company had a room full of temp secretaries just a few steps down the hall from my desk. But this VP needed a letter typed and came careening out of his office, right past my 2 male co-workers, made a beeline straight for me, and said, “do you know how to TYPE????!!!!” He never thought to ask either of them if they knew how to type,

(FYI, I type like the wind - and that was back when there were electric typewriters which purposely slowed us down, not like today’s laptops that have no depression or pushback. And I STILL could type like the wind.)

But I didn’t want HIM to know that. So I replied, “um…yeah…I…guess, a little?” and he said, “GREAT! Type up this letter right NOW!” So I went to the secretary’s desk, and took my sweet time finding the letterhead. Then I took three tries to roll it into the carriage straight. Then I started typing and went, “Whoops! You want copies, right?” and he said, “right”. So I threw out that piece of paper, dug around in the desk to find 2 sheets of carbon paper, layered the 2 sheets of carbon paper with 3 sheets of letterhead, and made another 3 tries of rolling the papers all together - and straight - into the carriage.

Then I started typing. Slowly. Like pretending to hunt and peck. Started out with “Dear Mr.” and went, “oh! Sorry! I was supposed to type today’s date first, right?” and he was grimacing and tapping his foot.

So I again got 3 new sheets of letterhead and alternated them with the 2 sheets of carbon paper, and took 3 tries to get it into the carriage straight. Then I typed the date, and, 2 lines lower, typed “dear Mr.” and went, “Oops! I made a typo!” and threw out the 3 pages of letterhead and started shuffling 3 more new sheets of letterhead with the 2 sheets of carbon paper, and….he exploded.

“GIVE ME THAT LETTER!”, he shouted. “Jesus, I’ll just take it to the Secretarial Pool!”

(YEAH, ya will, you macho chauvinistic creep, I thought to myself.)

Meanwhile, when our secretary got there, she looked like she’d been crying. I took her arm and we walked to another floor and sat in that company’s break room, so she could tell me what happened.

She WAS pregnant again. Her 5th child in 6 years. She was Catholic, and abortion was not something she would do. But, at her OB/GYN appointment, to which her husband accompanied her, she told her (male) doctor that, when this child was born, she wanted her tubes tied immediately.

Her male doctor and her male husband then talked about this in front of her as though she weren’t even there, and her male husband said “Catholics don’t do that” and her male doctor said, “they sure don’t, especially not in this convent-run hospital”.

So she stood up and told them, “This is the last child I”m having. I will have this baby in another hospital, in order to get my tubes tied immediately after it’s born. I will get another OB MD to deliver my baby. And I will get another husband if that’s necessary, too.”

Then she walked out of the convent-run hospital, called a cab, and came straight to work.

Yes, I know you’ve gone back to the top of this reply to check the date. That’s right - all this happened in 1980 - not 1880.

It was a man’s world, baby. Thank your lucky stars that women like me (and my mother and my grandmother and my brave secretary) made it better for all the women that came after us, by proving our worth and refusing to be treated like that anymore.

UPDATE: WOW! So many upvotes, thank you!

And even more encouraging, so many sincere thanks and support from both women and men who are determined to make this type of treatment of women (and not just in the workplace) be a thing of the past.

Thanks for the edit ideas - I chose not to use them. I did a stream-of-consciousness type of reply, and I typed exactly the way I speak, knowing that this answer was not going to be a peer-reviewed article for a professional journal that demanded APA 6th Edition grammar.

It’s been very uplifting to see that only 5 people (tragically, 3 of them are women) chose to use my answer as a reason to support misogyny and belittle feminism. The original answer was just to the question of “what’s the rudest job interview you’ve ever had”, and I stated that a man demanded of me a promise that I would not marry, have a child, or go back to graduate school for at least 5 years as a condition of his employing me.

Now, you 5 who love the status quo: do you really believe ANY man in the US has EVER had to make such a promise in order to get hired?

Many, many sincere thanks to those who upvoted and wrote positive replies.