Friday, September 14, 2007
Wilson, Chap 6-8
In Chapter 6 Wilson talked about the creation of "Take Our Daughters to Work Day." I think it is an amazing idea and have participated in it throughout my life. But, I didn't know that it was originally take your "daughter" and not "child." I found it interesting that the reaction from men was so immediate that they wanted the boys involved too. I'm not trying to bash men here, but they obviously didn't see the bigger picture. While all children do need encouragement, girls tend to have less support in this arena. I thought Eleanor Holmes Norton's quote was so funny, but sadly true that needing a Take Ours Sons to Work Day was "'like saying we need a White History Month.'"(Wilson, 102) As is it, boys have such an advantage over girls in the workforce and in their dreams about what they want to do. So often I have heard girls being shot down when they tell their teachers or just an adult in their life what they hope to become. Yet, I have never had a boy tell me that "my teacher told me I couldn't do that," or "be more realiztic." And most often, it's women teachers or mothers saying these things! It's heartbreaking. How are we to overcome this gap if other women are perpetually telling children essentially to dream small!
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2 comments:
It's sadly the boys who need more help "making it" now. Girls do better in school, have far lower suicide rates, far less discipline problems, and upon graduating, at least before they have children and choose to remove themselves from the workforce, they make more money than men. The 20-something "men" are called slackers because the women are out-achieving them by every measure. We've paid so much attention to girls the last 20 years, our often fatherless boys have become second-class citizens, drugged up with ritalin to tame their rambunctiousness so they can sit still in all-female-led classrooms, with no male role model to teach them how to be men.
But hey, they're just members of the oppressive class, so who cares about them? We should all care, because their current situation is bad for everybody.
Katie--this is so true! I think when men fought to get their sons involved they were totally missing the bigger picture. It seems like men didn't understand that the purpose was for daughters to see all of the possibilities that they had in life--that they didn't have to follow traditional female roles.
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