Women's rights general conversations - Thread 4

And Ovarit, obvs!

(which I never use because I absolutely hate the font and find it impossible to concentrate on!)

Kiwifarms, Datalounge, Tattlelife, LipstickAlley, Pistonheads?

Not necessarily recommending any of them btw, they all have their own audiences and unique cultures and you may (especially in KF) encounter some seriously uncivil language but all are places that as far as I can tell, prioritise speaking freely and frankly over avoiding offence.

For now, anyways.

Is it possible, anywhere but twitter, to have an honest discussion about TWAW? I think a sensitive matter even here.

And AGP?

Great post, Crows, fully agree with that. The current climate is just so regressive, despite the claims of 'equality' and 'inclusion'.

While there was definitely a lot of gender stereotyping in the 70s it was different to what it is now because I felt we were working through it and attempting to go a different way. Also, we weren't all pink for girls and blue for boys beyond layettes for babies and often those were yellow because nobody knew if a boy or a girl was coming. I got to wear lots of pretty dresses but also lots of shorts and trousers and t-shirts and very little of any of them were pink. We weren't confronted by Playboy stuff for little girls - which is just so fucking wrong - yes, we had gendered toys but if you had a brother then your Barbie or Sindy played with Action Man, went camping and she used his weapons to fuck things up. Well, I did.

I think we're more obsessed with gender stereotypes now than we were then. Back then and until things went all genderism we were aware that gender was a construct, that what women were in the 50s was not what we were anymore. That we could, if we wanted, rewrite what it meant to be either a man or a woman. In the 80s we had "gender benders" like Boy George who could be a full-on man and dress in a way that was neither male nor female, just the right sort of man for who he was. If he had been young now they'd be trying to get him to a gender reassignment clinic and telling him that he was obviously a woman. Anyone who wants to play with "the rules" can no longer be a feminine man or a masculine woman. They have to play by the rules and "change" gender. We've gone from insisting that a man was a man and a woman was a woman, to trying to change what that meant, to going right back to insisting that gender rules must be obeyed and if that means cutting things off, demanding that others call you man/woman because that's what you're feeling, then so be it.

God knows if any of that makes sense and apologies if it doesn't. tl;dr: Gender be a bit mental.

On a vaguely related topic, I just diacovered this extract from a talk given by Dr Mary Hemingway Rees, of the Institute of Medical Psychology, to the Parents’ Circle of my old school in March 1936. The bit about women as not just 'a' but 'the' wage earner caught my eye.

“There were, the lecturer said, many new factors affecting the attitude of the younger generation to the family – the tempo of modern life (a four-year-old now was much more sophisticated than fifty years ago), the taking for granted of miracles like the wireless and the cinema. It seemed as if there was nothing left to wonder at. Achievement nowadays demanded less effort than before: consider Woolworths, where a child could get for a few pence what its parents would have laboured months to buy. There had been a loosening of the family fabric as a result of the emotional strain of the war years. There were the additional problems of the divided home, and the economic factor (the woman was now often the wage earner, and the child lost the old sense of security given by the mother who was always at home). There was now much greater freedom in dress and manners; the cinema had made family life public, too often as a series of crises and conflicts. Cheap newspapers, dealing with the intimate life of film stars, and cheap cosmetics, promising the art of ‘allure’, were added difficulties. Children’s minds were more critical, and the doctrine of parental infallibility no longer held.”

All photos of me as a child in the 50s show me with short hair, wearing either trousers or shorts, except of course for the school/Brownie uniform ones. By the mid-60s I was making my own clothes (those needlework classes were actually useful!), so am mostly in mini-skirts/dresses or jeans. The hair was usually long and straight, though I did once get a hairdresser in Richmond, Yorks to produce a very decent approximation of a Vidal Sassoon asymmetrical bob!

I don't know where this idea came from that clothes were "gendered" (hateful word!) until whatever year it was that they made everything so free and wonderful for us. Was there some period in the 70s/80s that time has erased from my memory when children's clothing was policed?

My secondary school (late 80s, first group of teens to do GCSEs instead of O Levels or CSEs) was a brand new comp created from a merger of two failing schools and desperately trying to be ‘different’.
The headteacher (and administrator rather than a teacher) came up with all sorts of weird peripheral stuff based on education in other countries (much earlier morning start than other local schools, no assemblies, ring binders instead of exercise books, just change for change sake really).

None of the lessons were officially gendered but there was still an obvious sex split in some subjects (just 3 girls in my top set double science GCSE class of 25 pupils). Textiles nearly all girls, DT (or whatever it was called then) nearly all boys.
Home Ec had become Food Tech or somesuch and was seen as a doss option for boys who didn’t want to do double science, which was probably unfair on the kids, male or female, who were genuinely interested.

I did Art which was probably 50/50, on average the girls were significantly better at it but the 1 or 2 boys who were good were treated like princes by the male teacher.

I was given dolls as a child in the 50s (this was before the Barbie/Sindy era) but I never played with them. My mum made most of my clothes, which were mainly dresses until I was maybe ten or so when I remember wearing jeans. My mum made a whole wardrobe of clothes for a doll I was bought one Christmas, out of remnants of my dresses, and gave them to me in a little suitcase covered in pink and white striped sticky-back plastic. All I ever did was undress the doll and leave it lying around naked until she dressed it again. I could weep when I think how ungrateful for her efforts I must have seemed, but the only toy I remember enjoying and playing with a lot was my Bayko building set. I don't think we had Lego available in the fifties, though I bought non-gendered Lego for my kids in the 80s and liked to play with it with them. And books of course - that's what I liked best. I do remember doing arty stuff with my mum though - potato prints! And I played cards with both my parents.

I agree! And kids loved to combine Action Man and Sindy into one game whenever they had the opportunity so even that’s not quite as divisive as it seems on the surface.

I have one older sister and we are the classic just-under-two-and-half-year age gap that was the norm in 70s/80s working class Britain.
My mum’s best friend had two sons of the same age gap, just a little older than us, so we got loads of their hand me down clothes and toys.

In the late 70s photos we all look the same, bowl hair cuts, corduroy trousers, earthy green and brown tones with a bit of bright orange. No one really remarked on anything gendered, except as some sort of distant future warning ‘oooh, you won’t be able to do that/wear that when you get a job/get married’ etc.

The major difference that I see now is that girls are discouraged from liking girl-coded things (make up, dresssing up, cuddly toys, glitter, dancing) where boys are are praised for the exact same interests.
I don’t see much of it going the other way ie girls being praised for like boy-coded things (Thomas the Tank Engine, team sports, Meccano/Lego) and boys from being discouraged from those interests.

My children range from 23-11 though, so I’m a little bit removed from the world of preschoolers/infant school (although some of my mum friends via my 11 year old do have younger children)

In my 1960s secondary education, girls did cookery and needlework and boys did woodwork and metalwork from what is now Y7 to Y9. Home Economics was an O level option for girls and boys could do Technical Drawing - can't remember if woodwork and metalwork continued to be available to boys. Either could do Art instead- I did.

Definitely doesn't match my experience of the 70s. Clothes and toys were both mainly hand-me-downs and went though a mix of boys and girls - we all wore the same jumpers and trousers, and mainly had the same haircuts. Playing was with everyone of similar age on the street, and we all shared toys. Girls had Meccano, Playmobile garages, Skalextric, skateboards. The only real difference was dolls - boys were just as likely to have them as girls, but theirs were Action Man while the girls had Barbie or Sindy. And my school didn't segregate subjects - everyone did both woodwork and cooking - although I know of some that did.

@DeanVolecapeAKAelderberry ... what is this world we are living in where a man listening to powerless women speak, and letting them be heard, is a towering hero?

Thanks for the link. I've just listened to that episode, having previously listened to the earlier two series on your recommendation. He is extraordinary in his empathy and his ability to just let people talk.

I often think back to the Guardian (always in the forefront of these things!), and their Style Guide, declaring that 'actress' was old-fashioned, and sexist, and "we don't say 'doctress' any more, do we?". And this kind of usage has become generally more commonplace. But then, next thing is, let's not bother having a Best Actress at the Oscars, let's just have one category. And it's not just about the Oscars. It's about the language of equality and inclusion actually being used to screw women over. A familiar refrain.

There's a new season of Paddy's podcasts. In the first episode Paddy O'Gorman talked to women in a hostel in Dublin,

https://twitter.com/paddyjogorman/status/1650456453860278272

http://paddyspodcast.ie/episodes-3/

what is this world we are living in where a man listening to powerless women speak, and letting them be heard, is a towering hero?

Full video (nearly 2 hours, how can anyone sit through 2 hours of one voice?) -

I was also intrigued to see someone on there defending TW in women's sports, especially with the somewhat incomprehensible argument that because women had not been permitted to compete in marathons until relatively recently, they weren't a good example of why competition against TW may be unfair. I genuinely have no idea how they came to that conclusion, nor whether I have misrepresented their point.

The poster I think you mean recently recommended Contrapoints' video response to the Witch Trials of JKR podcast. I really do try to look at materials from both sides but this has, I think, defeated me - 2hrs of arch, self-referential sophistry. Well, unless the second hour is very unlike the first.