In fact, in some Native American nations, like the six Iroquois, the elder matriarch is responsible for appointing the chief, holding him to certain standards and removing him if he fails to measure up, Wagner said.

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MYTH: Contraception is a modern convention.

REALITY: Condoms, diaphragms and the sponge have been around since the 1800s.

The birth control pill may have not come on the market until 1960, but a variety of effective contraception methods were available to both women and men in the United States well before 1850, Wagner said.

It was the Comstock Act, passed in 1873, that changed everything — allowing Anthony Comstock, a conservative Christian who proposed the legislation, to determine what was considered “obscene” in the country. “He decided that anything to do with sex or reproduction was obscene,” Wagner said.

As a result, hundreds of people were arrested and imprisoned under the Comstock Act for distributing or possessing contraception, or publishing information about it. The activist Ida Craddock was among them, arrested for distributing such information. She took her own life shortly before her sentencing, which she believed would be life imprisonment.

In her suicide note, she wrote: “I earnestly hope that the American public will awaken to a sense of the danger which threatens it from Comstockism.”

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MYTH: Feminists burned bras.

REALITY: No bras were burned! Seriously.

The myth emerged on a hot summer day in 1969, when feminists gathered on the boardwalk of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, N.J., to protest the competition.