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Jun. 4th, 2009 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeI've been reading Dale Carlson's Girls are Equal Too, an American feminism-for-teenagers book from 1973. While it talks a lot about structural and material discriminations, its focus is mostly on highlighting how gender is constructed, and that the innate rubbishness of girls is not actually a fact.
While it's perfectly true that you have excellent legs for standing or running on and an able mind to think with, avoid using them at all costs. Use only the hands, to clap with. And when you get tired of clapping for your boyfriend or eventually your husband, don't worry. You can always have sons and clap for them. (Not your daughters, however. Remember, they, too, have to learn to be stupid, inferior, and passive.)
There is a lot of focus on male/female relationships, and there is not even a question of not being heterosexual, though there is an emphasis on doing heterosexuality differently from the supposed norm. Lesbianism is (not so) obliquely referenced in the stereotypes about feminism:
A lot of people still think of Women's Liberation as a great, big nasty machine invented to gobble up nice, little girls and sweet, devoted housewives and rearrange them somehow into mannish monsters who grow moustaches and eat barbed wire for breakfast.
However, she doesn't immediately leap to say of course feminists aren't like that (though she certainly doesn't outright say that it would be fine if they were), she writes about how it's about choice and knowledge and things. Quite wishy-washy, but a welcome change from some of the more modern feminism-for-teenagers stuff where everyone bangs on and on about how much FUN make-up is, and how much FUN it is to kiss boys, and feminism is all about FUN. Carlson does also, which I liked a lot, write about how social conditioning affects boys:
You're supposed to flatter him (mother told you to build up a man's ego) in as many ways as possible. (This is called being feminine.) Other ways to be feminine are to giggle at his jokes, to behave as if you couldn't cross a street by yourself, and to be built like Raquel Welsh. (He, if he is properly masculine, will have the grace to be at least six feet tall, be able to lift twice his own weight, and will be planning to be as rich as you are beautiful.
and there's a write-up of a discussion group with high school girls where they talk about maybe their boy friends would like to be called up instead of having to call all the time, and that it must be frustrating to have to pay all the time (though Carlson is really clear that the idea that paying for something confers some kind of obligation is not okay.)
Her attempts to write about race are rather confusing. Up until her chapter on "Women in College", she writes for an undefined "you" who is pretty clearly (if I read the coding correctly) white and middle class. Then she writes:
We haven't discussed the special problems of being black, because up until now the problems have been much the same for all girls, black and white. From here on in, if you happen to be black as well as a woman, you can just about double the difficulties. you have to work against two handicaps: racism and sexism.
...huh? I really, really don't know how on earth she can think or say that the social, material and structural differences that she identifies as affecting black women (mostly she focuses on pay and occupational segregation) suddenly and magically spring up in college, and that black children will not have been affected by racism in any way.
I don't know if it's just my modern sensibilities, or perhaps an Atlantic divide, but I kind of felt while reading it that while probably a childhood in the late 50s/early 60s was likely to be fairly shaped by traditional gender stereotypes, it wasn't necessarily the utter division she made it out to be. I guess that, like I said, she's writing for an assumed audience that does think that sexism is natural and ingrained, and so she's pointing it out in the baldest possible terms, but I'm not entirely convinced that girls would have been brought up to think about their looks as much as she says.
She also writes about a reading guide she came across, that quite apart from being monumentally and crassly sexist, I have no idea what on earth it's meant to do:
recently I came across a professional guide to teaching reading called Alpha One, which was so sexist I couldn't believe it. Enough to make any girl cringe, it told the teahcer to give each letter a personality. The vowels, says the text, are five girls who are always crying and complaining about the work they have to do. It's their way of getting sumpathy from the boys who are consonants.
Girls are Equal Too is the earliest feminism-for-teenagers book I've looked at so far. My favourite, probably, is Feminism for Girls: An Adventure Story, a British collection from 1981.
One of the things I like about it is that it acknowledged straight off the bat that feminism is widely derided, and the introduction opens with:
To the world at large it might seem a bit strange, linking the Women's Liberation Movement and feminism with ideas of adventure. Hardly surprising, when most of the mass media do their best to reduce anything to do with women's liberation to the antics of a minority fringe group. As far as they are concerned, we are all dull, boring and quite united in our lack of humour. With this kind of publicity to contend with, it does indeed take an adventurous girl to give feminism more than a second thought.
and then doesn't focus on these myths or try to rebrand feminism as some cool trend, just says that they're wrong, and calmly goes off to talk about more important things, like discrimination at school, lesbian teenagers and race, the chapter on which starts with this note:
In this chapter we seek to examine some of the problems that black women face. The chapters in this book cover many different aspects of young women's sexuality, but we have in one chapter to address as many general issues as we can. Many of you may feel that this is tokenism, but we decided that it was important to use the space to say something positive about black women's struggles rather than be invisible yet again.
I'm not aware of any particular youth texts from pre-second wave eras at all. They really form a key part of later feminisms, proliferating in the 1990s, and starting to be written much more by actual girls/young women instead of by older women.
I didn't ever read a book like this when I was growing up, and I don't think I know of anyone who became interested in feminism in this way. Conversations with people on lj mostly seem to have people reading things like The Female Eunuch or The Second Sex, rather than anything particularly for young people. I don't really know how useful/effective I think they are - if there is actually a need for what are essentially recruitment/evangelical texts. I certainly have problems with how they try to sell feminism to people, and what is considered acceptable to jettison in order to have a smooth, glossy mass-market appeal.
While it's perfectly true that you have excellent legs for standing or running on and an able mind to think with, avoid using them at all costs. Use only the hands, to clap with. And when you get tired of clapping for your boyfriend or eventually your husband, don't worry. You can always have sons and clap for them. (Not your daughters, however. Remember, they, too, have to learn to be stupid, inferior, and passive.)
There is a lot of focus on male/female relationships, and there is not even a question of not being heterosexual, though there is an emphasis on doing heterosexuality differently from the supposed norm. Lesbianism is (not so) obliquely referenced in the stereotypes about feminism:
A lot of people still think of Women's Liberation as a great, big nasty machine invented to gobble up nice, little girls and sweet, devoted housewives and rearrange them somehow into mannish monsters who grow moustaches and eat barbed wire for breakfast.
However, she doesn't immediately leap to say of course feminists aren't like that (though she certainly doesn't outright say that it would be fine if they were), she writes about how it's about choice and knowledge and things. Quite wishy-washy, but a welcome change from some of the more modern feminism-for-teenagers stuff where everyone bangs on and on about how much FUN make-up is, and how much FUN it is to kiss boys, and feminism is all about FUN. Carlson does also, which I liked a lot, write about how social conditioning affects boys:
You're supposed to flatter him (mother told you to build up a man's ego) in as many ways as possible. (This is called being feminine.) Other ways to be feminine are to giggle at his jokes, to behave as if you couldn't cross a street by yourself, and to be built like Raquel Welsh. (He, if he is properly masculine, will have the grace to be at least six feet tall, be able to lift twice his own weight, and will be planning to be as rich as you are beautiful.
and there's a write-up of a discussion group with high school girls where they talk about maybe their boy friends would like to be called up instead of having to call all the time, and that it must be frustrating to have to pay all the time (though Carlson is really clear that the idea that paying for something confers some kind of obligation is not okay.)
Her attempts to write about race are rather confusing. Up until her chapter on "Women in College", she writes for an undefined "you" who is pretty clearly (if I read the coding correctly) white and middle class. Then she writes:
We haven't discussed the special problems of being black, because up until now the problems have been much the same for all girls, black and white. From here on in, if you happen to be black as well as a woman, you can just about double the difficulties. you have to work against two handicaps: racism and sexism.
...huh? I really, really don't know how on earth she can think or say that the social, material and structural differences that she identifies as affecting black women (mostly she focuses on pay and occupational segregation) suddenly and magically spring up in college, and that black children will not have been affected by racism in any way.
I don't know if it's just my modern sensibilities, or perhaps an Atlantic divide, but I kind of felt while reading it that while probably a childhood in the late 50s/early 60s was likely to be fairly shaped by traditional gender stereotypes, it wasn't necessarily the utter division she made it out to be. I guess that, like I said, she's writing for an assumed audience that does think that sexism is natural and ingrained, and so she's pointing it out in the baldest possible terms, but I'm not entirely convinced that girls would have been brought up to think about their looks as much as she says.
She also writes about a reading guide she came across, that quite apart from being monumentally and crassly sexist, I have no idea what on earth it's meant to do:
recently I came across a professional guide to teaching reading called Alpha One, which was so sexist I couldn't believe it. Enough to make any girl cringe, it told the teahcer to give each letter a personality. The vowels, says the text, are five girls who are always crying and complaining about the work they have to do. It's their way of getting sumpathy from the boys who are consonants.
Girls are Equal Too is the earliest feminism-for-teenagers book I've looked at so far. My favourite, probably, is Feminism for Girls: An Adventure Story, a British collection from 1981.
One of the things I like about it is that it acknowledged straight off the bat that feminism is widely derided, and the introduction opens with:
To the world at large it might seem a bit strange, linking the Women's Liberation Movement and feminism with ideas of adventure. Hardly surprising, when most of the mass media do their best to reduce anything to do with women's liberation to the antics of a minority fringe group. As far as they are concerned, we are all dull, boring and quite united in our lack of humour. With this kind of publicity to contend with, it does indeed take an adventurous girl to give feminism more than a second thought.
and then doesn't focus on these myths or try to rebrand feminism as some cool trend, just says that they're wrong, and calmly goes off to talk about more important things, like discrimination at school, lesbian teenagers and race, the chapter on which starts with this note:
In this chapter we seek to examine some of the problems that black women face. The chapters in this book cover many different aspects of young women's sexuality, but we have in one chapter to address as many general issues as we can. Many of you may feel that this is tokenism, but we decided that it was important to use the space to say something positive about black women's struggles rather than be invisible yet again.
I'm not aware of any particular youth texts from pre-second wave eras at all. They really form a key part of later feminisms, proliferating in the 1990s, and starting to be written much more by actual girls/young women instead of by older women.
I didn't ever read a book like this when I was growing up, and I don't think I know of anyone who became interested in feminism in this way. Conversations with people on lj mostly seem to have people reading things like The Female Eunuch or The Second Sex, rather than anything particularly for young people. I don't really know how useful/effective I think they are - if there is actually a need for what are essentially recruitment/evangelical texts. I certainly have problems with how they try to sell feminism to people, and what is considered acceptable to jettison in order to have a smooth, glossy mass-market appeal.
