Re: Herding of girls and boys into their respective "appropriate" classes by
schools
Well, I can't speak for the rest of the country, but it seems perhaps I
should be glad to live when and where I do. I'm 19, and live in northern
New Jersey in the New York City suburbs. Our public middle school required
everyone to take during sixth and seventh grade a rotation of short courses
that served as samples of the options available to us in eigth grade.
Everyone took a mini-course in wood shop, metal shop, sewing, cooking, art,
French, Spanish, and German, and then was free to choose one or two of these
for a full year course. While it's true that there were more boys in the
shop classes and more girls in the home economics classes, there was a
significant overlap, and I don't remember any feeling that I was pushed
towards any one class. If the guidance counselors favored any of the classes
they were the language classes, which were encouraged to make us more
"well-rounded" and "culturally aware," and as the only classes which gave us
a head start on high school.
In fact, I remember being more surprised by the number of boys who took
cooking and sewing than the girls who took shop. It seemed to me that while
free will, independence, and varying degrees of "femininity" or lack thereof
had become expected of the girls, for boys to choose to take sewing class
still required some degree of determination and ability to defend his social
status. Perhaps it would be a good idea to keep in mind that the
discrimination works it both directions.
Just a couple of notes on what I've written...
When I say discrimination works both ways, I am not saying that it works
*equally* in both directions, or that it works that way in every situation.
When I say that varying degrees of femininity were expected, I do not mean
that the girls taking shop were masculine and the girls taking home ec. were
feminine. I only mean that some of the girls (of both shop and home ec.)
were noticeably and intentionally unfeminine without being socially outcast.
On the other hand, I don't particularly remember any boys who intentionally
stood out as unmasculine.
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