women's studies
Women of the world have been fighting the battle against gender discrimination throughout time. It has been proven that in the past, and even today, boys and girls are steered by society into different fields of study, different occupations, and different roles in life. By interviewing my mother, I learned to see the way in which a woman can be blind to the abundant and life-changing discrimination of society. The reality of the discrimination against women in the school system is supported very well by “Gender Equity in the Classroom: The Unfinished Agenda”, by Myra Sadker, David Sadker, Lynn Fox, and Melinda Salata. The authors expose the sexism behind everyday occurrences in the classroom, displaying how differently boys and girls are taught by teachers and assisted by counselors. The unfairness is daunting. This discrimination follows women into the work place, which is brought to attention in the essay “An Overview of Women and Work”, by Ellen Braxo and Gloria Santa Anna. While so many women are unaware of being channeled into less challenging careers and part time occupations, it is hard to miss the surplus of men, having no superior qualifications, promoted to more important and more profitable positions. This and many other discriminating situations were experienced first hand by my mother. During our interview, I learned a lot about my mother as a woman, and the answers to many questions I have pondered over the years. However, I was not the only one to see her life from a different perspective. After our interview, my mother began to question why she chose the path she did, and if she had in fact followed the guidelines placed on women by society. My mother was born in 1946 in Chicago, IL. During her early years, her family life was nothing out of the ordinary, with her mother at home and her father working as a chiropractor. However, when she was ten years old her mother left to work in order to put her husband through medical school. Now she was working during the day, and coming home to housework at night. Her father never helped around the house, and, out of rebellion, neither did my mother. She was the eldest of three siblings, and the only girl. Seeing as her brothers never had to help cook or clean, she saw it unfair for her to have to do so. Her mother would bitch and yell about having to do all the house work, but her husband was exhausted from medical school and it was much faster for her to just do it herself than try to make her children help. After witnessing this, “I decided that I would never have such an unbalanced relationship if I ever got married”, stated my mother in our interview. The way in which my grandmother resentfully flew through her housework as if by habit is reflected on in “The Sexual Politics of Interpersonal Behavior”, by Nancy Henley and Jo Freeman. It is quoted, “Inferiority becomes habitual, and the inferior place assumes the familiarity – and even desirability – of home (81).” It was her life as she knew it, and although she worked, she had assumed the duties of a housewife, whether she liked it or not. My grandfather’s job caused their family to move frequently, which can be hard on children in general. Her brothers never seemed to have problems making friends, but as my mother remembers, “the girls my age were always very bitchy and catty, keeping to their own cliques. So it was much harder for me to make girl friends moving around as much as we did.” She then went on to tell me that she always wanted to be a boy. She stated, “When I was about 4 years old, I wanted to be Roy Rogers. I was never allowed to be him when I played with the boys, but I was always him when I played by myself. I remember wanting a cowboy suit more than anything in the world, but when Christmas finally came, I got a cow girl suit instead. I was so upset. I never wanted to be Dale Evans. So that day I decided I was going to be a boy.” She kept this mentality as she grew up as a ‘tom boy’, having mostly boy friends.