Sherry Chandler » Blog Against Sexism Day
Blog Against Sexism Day
I have had one of those weeks when ducks refuse to stay neatly lined up in rows. Do they ever?
Which reminds me that, in the current Oxford American, Alan Gurganus had this to say about choosing this year’s New Stories from the South:
Like the Bible parables that oftentimes inspire them, Southern stories can come front-loaded with tag-line lessons. Others are so nostalgic for our cotton-picking past, they resemble the cutesy Mall Art you’ve seen while trying not to.
Such plaques show three small farm-girls, bonnets in profile worn over matching gingham granny-dresses: they are depicted herding a row of pretty geese about the girls’ same height. (Now, on farms I knew in Eastern North Carolina, geese would have fought all children’s sticks and guidance. Geese that size attack kids so little! But not in “art.”)
My week has been like those North Carolina geese, fighting all efforts of mine to bring it into line.
But like Gurganus, I digress.
What I meant to say is that I haven’t really had time to think much about the International Day of the Woman or Blog Against Sexism Day. Instead, therefore, I’ll defer to I See Invisible People. Though she currently lives in the northwest, Terry has roots in the southern Appalachians and she knows how to tell a tale:
I was a “bad girl,” born in the wrong part of town and with the wrong last name to be considered intelligent. Still, I collected As when I bothered to show up, which I did for my math and science classes. I was good at it, and that was powerful feeling of success. The end of my junior year, I aced my ACTs and the college offers started flowing in. When I was offered a full scholarship to Boston University, I went in to see my guidance councilor for help in deciding where to go.
She took a look at my transcript and my test scores, and told me I shouldn’t bother thinking about a real college; perhaps I could take the nurses aid training course at the community college, and after a few years maybe I could get into a nursing program. I shouldn’t get above myself. I ignored her and sent off my acceptance letter to Boston.
And this was where Hollywood would leave it, with one of those Mall Art moral tagline. But this is real life and the story goes on. Go and read the whole thing.
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1 Comment
1. Georgia Green Stamper replies at 10th March 2006, 12:25 am :
I don’t deny that sexism exists. Any woman who has had to negoiate wtih workmen in her home or call a male pediatrician at midnight about a sick child has experienced this to some degree. But the extreme sexism in the school system as described in “the rest of the story” you direct us to on The See Invisible People blog doesn’t seem typical for the 1970s - or even earlier. While I, personally, did not excel at math and science, it was not for lack of modeling. All but one of my science and math teachers in high school were female. My own mother, who graduated from a tiny, rural high school in Kentucky in 1939, majored in pre-med in college and was admitted to medical school (WW II and finances derailed her.) She became a high school physics, chemistry, and math teacher, instead, and prepared many farm kids (including females) for careers in science. At the small college I attended in the 1960s, women were well represented in the math and science majors. In fact, my roommate, a math and physics major, went on to a long government career that has involved “top secret” mathematical work. In the 1990s, in the Eastern Kentucky public high school my daughters attended, many of the top science and math students were female. I can quickly think of many who went into careers in medicine (doctors), accounting, math education, and research. All of the college prep students were required to take at least pre-calculus, and most took calculus and trigonometry. Now this was a decent high school, but it was nothing fancy or extraordinary and it was located in a small “traditonal values” town . One of my three daughters, now an attorney, majored in math in college. She won the math department award at graduation, and her math professors seemed dissappointed that she did not pursue a math related career.
So, no, I have to say that I have not personally encountered sexism in the classroom. I think sexism is much more subtle. My mother, for example, chose to marry a soldier in the 1940s and begin a family and thus felt she could no longer accept financial assistance from her parents as a married woman with a child (and education loans were not so easily available then.) Or girls fret that boys won’t find them sexually attractive if they are “too smart” - smarter than the boys. This dumbing down starts in middle school, and it is self-imposed. It can be argued that the schools could/should do a better job of not allowing this to happen. Still, it seems unfair to blame all of society’s complexities and failures onto the school system.
Well, this is much too long, and I certainly don’t mean to be unsympathetic or dismissive of the experience that the blog writer had. But as the daughter of a strong mother and the mother of three strong daughters, I believe the first, best way to attack sexism is to encourage our daughters to think and achieve.
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