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Gender Mystique

Advice to young secretaries, 1964

11/3/2016

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I am tempted to post this without comment, but decided against it. This was my world as a young woman. Not just for secretaries, but for just about any woman seeking employment. The author, Ruth Millett, was not particularly conservative; she made her reputation early in her career as an advocate for working mothers during World War II. The advice she dispenses here was what we heard from our mothers, teachers, and mentors, because it was just the way things were. 
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I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton heard this advice at least as much as I did. Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone complain about "her voice, her clothes, her smile". 
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This week in gender

9/7/2014

 
Forgive the lazy post, but it was the first week of classes, I am in the middle of reviewing the page proof for Sex and Unisex, and I am being dogged by three other projects all with deadlines on or around September 15. In the meantime, the news items about dress and gender just won't take a break! Here are a few that distracted me long enough to read, even though there was not time to add commentary.

Rastafarian High School Student Sent Home From School For Ten Days For Having Dreadlocks (ThinkProgress, 9/4/2014)

School Dress Codes: The Funny-Not-Funny Video You Have to See (Soraya Chemaly for the Huffington Post, 9/5/2014)

Hear Us Roar: Finding Feminism in Fashion
(Maya Singer for Style.com, 9/5/2014)

Tell Me About It: Boy who likes ‘girl’ things needs guidance, not shame (Carolyn Hax, syndicated, 9/5/2014)
OK, a little bit of commentary. Carolyn Hax's response to the concerned auntie contained brightened my dreary, ink-spattered life.
Unless someone over their shoulders is shaming them back to their side of the gender line (sadly, not a hypothetical one), children will like what they like, and that means that superheroes, bright pink and dinosaurs often live together in harmony in a child’s imagination.

That some adults, and apparently 99.5 percent of toy marketers, want to “fix” this by shaming kids into conformity is, to my mind, an obscenity long overdue for hard societal push-back.

Indeed!

    Jo Paoletti

    Professor Emerita
    ​American Studies
    University of Maryland

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