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supiluliumas rants about sexism
Aug. 16th, 2006 10:17 am"If I may get on the soapbox for a second, you know, there is nothing in the world so self-serving and cynical as sexism, and this is coming from a human being who is nothing if not self-serving and cynical, so I know what I'm talking about.
"Take the animal kingdom. The division of labor between male and female, the way it seems to me, is sometimes almost arbitrary. But I'm not a zoologist.
"In the early Suffragette movement, a group of hecklers at a rally were trying to shout down speakers who were attempting to make the radical assertion that women were as capable as men in most occupations; said hecklers apparently felt that women were simply too delicate for man's work. The great Sojourner Truth, a former slave, mounted the stage and pointed out to these men that in her youth she had worked from sunup to sundown performing the most backbreaking labor imaginable with nothing else to sustain her save a pot of gruel, a slab of hardtack and some cornbread, with nothing to look forward to (at least, thankfully, until the Civil War) save the fact that she might die someday, and she had done all this even with what the heckling gentlemen claimed was an inescapable defect in performing manual labor, the fact that she was a woman. No one had anything witty to reply to the assertions of Sojourner Truth.
"We knew at the end of World War II that women were as perfectly capable as men in the heavy machinery industries - they built our bombers, tanks, ships, and artillery. But when the men came home, back in the kitchen they went, and once again were fenced behind the comfortable delusion that such things were "a man's job" and women were too delicate for that sort of thing.
"The same thing here! Women clearly demonstrate computing and mathematical ability on a par with men, but once the computing occupation was taken over by machines, suddenly, somehow, mathematics was once again beyond the female ken. "Dizzy dames" didn't do math, they collected recipes or some such thing.
So despite the fact that knowing women are as capable as men in all these professions, still, these myths are perpetuated and these stereotypes reinforced because somebody felt it was somehow in the best interests of society to do so, and the gullible hoi-polloi - and a certain segment of the male gender who were only too willing to play along - swallowed it hook, line and sinker."
"Take the animal kingdom. The division of labor between male and female, the way it seems to me, is sometimes almost arbitrary. But I'm not a zoologist.
"In the early Suffragette movement, a group of hecklers at a rally were trying to shout down speakers who were attempting to make the radical assertion that women were as capable as men in most occupations; said hecklers apparently felt that women were simply too delicate for man's work. The great Sojourner Truth, a former slave, mounted the stage and pointed out to these men that in her youth she had worked from sunup to sundown performing the most backbreaking labor imaginable with nothing else to sustain her save a pot of gruel, a slab of hardtack and some cornbread, with nothing to look forward to (at least, thankfully, until the Civil War) save the fact that she might die someday, and she had done all this even with what the heckling gentlemen claimed was an inescapable defect in performing manual labor, the fact that she was a woman. No one had anything witty to reply to the assertions of Sojourner Truth.
"We knew at the end of World War II that women were as perfectly capable as men in the heavy machinery industries - they built our bombers, tanks, ships, and artillery. But when the men came home, back in the kitchen they went, and once again were fenced behind the comfortable delusion that such things were "a man's job" and women were too delicate for that sort of thing.
"The same thing here! Women clearly demonstrate computing and mathematical ability on a par with men, but once the computing occupation was taken over by machines, suddenly, somehow, mathematics was once again beyond the female ken. "Dizzy dames" didn't do math, they collected recipes or some such thing.
So despite the fact that knowing women are as capable as men in all these professions, still, these myths are perpetuated and these stereotypes reinforced because somebody felt it was somehow in the best interests of society to do so, and the gullible hoi-polloi - and a certain segment of the male gender who were only too willing to play along - swallowed it hook, line and sinker."
