General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forumswomen's herstory month 2012 theme--women's education-women's empowerment
(hmmm, thinking about the war on women, and the war on education, and now reading this)
2012 National Womens History Month Theme:
Womens Education Womens Empowerment
Although women now outnumber men in American colleges nationwide, the reversal of the gender gap is a very recent phenomenon. The fight to learn was a valiant struggle waged by many tenacious womenacross years and across culturesin our country. After the American Revolution, the notion of education as a safeguard for democracy created opportunities for girls to gain a basic educationbased largely on the premise that, as mothers, they would nurture not only the bodies but also the minds of (male) citizens and leaders. The concept that educating women meant educating mothers endured in America for many years, at all levels of education.
Pioneers of secondary education for young women faced arguments from physicians and other experts who claimed either that females were incapable of intellectual development equal to men, or that they would be harmed by striving for it. Womens supposed intellectual and moral weakness was also used to argue against coeducation, which would surely be an assault on purity and femininity. Emma Willard, in her 1819 Plan for Improving Female Education, noted with derision the focus of womens education on fostering the display of youth and beauty, and asserted that women are the companions, not the satellites of menprimary existences whose education must prepare them to be full partners in lifes journey.
While Harvard, the first college chartered in America, was founded in 1636, it would be almost two centuries before the founding of the first college to admit womenOberlin, which was chartered in 1833. And even as coeducation grew, womens courses of study were often different from mens, and womens role models were few, as most faculty members were male. Harvard itself opened its Annex (Radcliffe) for women in 1879 rather than admit women to the mens collegeand single-sex education remained the elite norm in the U.S. until the early 1970s. As coeducation took hold in the Ivy League, the number of womens colleges decreased steadily; those that remain still answer the need of young women to find their voices, and todays womens colleges enroll a far more diverse cross-section of the country than did the original Seven Sisters.
The equal opportunity to learn, taken for granted by most young women today, owes much to Title IX of the Education Codes of the Higher Education Act Amendments. This legislation, passed in 1972 and enacted in 1977, prohibited gender discrimination by federally funded institutions. It has become the primary tool for women's fuller participation in all aspects of education from scholarships, to facilities, to classes formerly closed to women. Indeed, it transformed the educational landscape of the United States within the span of a generation.
http://www.nwhp.org/whm/2012theme.php
2ndAmForComputers
(3,527 posts)(See how silly this looks?)
niyad
(113,364 posts)Talkin Gender Neutral Blues
(Kristin Lems)
January 19, 2005
words and music by Kristin Lems c 2005
This talkin blues (or is it a pre-rap?) is in the Woody Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie, and Bob Dylan tradition....musing aloud to a chord progression. The song is printed in the "Feminist Dictionary" and some other places.
I was walkin down the street one day
Reading the signs that passed my way
And after a while I started to see
That none of those words referred to me...
Good will towards men, all men are created equal,
Praise Him!
Well I asked some friends if they agreed
That they felt left out in the things they read
They told me yes, and added some more
And soon we all felt pretty sore
You got your Congressman, spaceman, sideman....
But I never heard a no house husband!
Well some men came by and a fight began to grow:
�You girls are so dumb you just don�t know,
These here are called �generic words�
They�re meant to include both the bees and the birds.�
Well gee fellas, how am I supposed to know?
I certainly don�t feel included!
Ok said I, if that�s so true,
I�ll just use �woman� to cover the two
�It don�t make a difference to us,� they said
�If you wanna use woman, go right ahead.�
I said, thanks, that�s really sisterly of you
Glad to see you believe in sportswomanship!
�Now hold your horses,� they started to cry.
I think I�ll hold my mares, said I.
�You�re leavin all of us guys behind.�
Why no, we�re all part of womankind.
So don�t fret friends, take it like a woman
You�ll get used to it, just like we all did!
http://www.kristinlems.com/
2ndAmForComputers
(3,527 posts)niyad
(113,364 posts)the fact that it, as many other words, are not in the song, does not preclude their use. be prepared, you are going to see a lot of that sort of thing if you stick around here.
2ndAmForComputers
(3,527 posts)longship
(40,416 posts)Sorry, but I agree that herstory is a bit lame. I may be a bit of a pendant but the etymology of history has nothing to do with gender.
I am genuinely supportive of the woman's rights movement but whoever thought up that word didn't do the movement any favors.
I am 100% behind using gender neutral language (unfortunately the English vernacular makes this difficult --- but we soldier on). Herstory is just silly and leaves an opening for enemies to falsely brand the whole enterprise with the same silliness.
It's the same thing with atheists (by which I proudly call myself) some of whom thought the tag Brights was a good idea. It didn't work out and I hope that neither will the exceptionally lame Herstory.
niyad
(113,364 posts)you might try reading mary daly's "wickedary" for some new insights into language and how it affects our perceptions.
I have to call bullshit on the word herstory. Not only does it not make any etymological sense, it reduces a very important issue, that of women's equality, to a silly, merely rhetorical argument.
What's next? "Hersterical?" "Hersterectomy?"
I just can't take any argument serious which argues for women's rights based on such trivialities.
Fight the fight worth winning. "Herstory" ain't it. Again, it's silly and allows the Real opponents to portray women's equality as a mere rhetorical argument (which, by the way it isn't).
Thank you for your opinion, though.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)and came to English via Latin and Norman French.
"His" is a Germanic pronoun that's not at all etymologically related. "His", as in "masculine third person", in Greek is αυτός (aftos).
niyad
(113,364 posts)people get their knickers in a twist and insist that etymology is pre-eminent and we cannot mess with it (even though we create words like repuke, and rethuglicons, every single day)
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)Not knowing the etymology is ignorant; knowing it and still insisting it's sexist when it clearly isn't is stupid.
niyad
(113,364 posts)and ignoring the content of the post--too much information, perhaps?
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)Seriously?
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)But now we are here; a boy's sister is 50% more likely to go to college than he is.
Women don't have an equal opportunity to learn, they have a superior opportunity to learn.
niyad
(113,364 posts)lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)Failing that, I will reply.
Don't call 3:2 superiority "equality".
niyad
(113,364 posts)show me where women make more than men, all across the board.
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)If you want to talk about wages, by all means, post a thread on that topic so I can make it "about the men!!!" too.
But here's a sneak preview. Women's dominance of education promulgates a system in which 92% of workplace fatalities are men. Men are 51% more likely to be injured on the job, and are injured more severely.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/osh2_11092011.pdf
Men take these jobs (which pay more because of the obvious risk) because they couldn't go to college.
treestar
(82,383 posts)The opportunity is equal. There are more women than men, so there should be more women than men in college.
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)more dropouts, more suspensions, poorer grades.
And there are a lot more school-age boys than girls.
In 2010, there were 11.3 million boys between 15 and 19 and 10.7 million girls.
The reason the population is mostly women is because men die younger.
niyad
(113,364 posts)translated into higher wages for women than men across the board.
but then, that sort of omission is not surprising.
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)If I have to tell you more than twice, the problem isn't on my end.
As more people become college graduates, safe and desirable jobs require arbitrarily higher levels of education to allow applicants to compete. The pay doesn't go up because the pool of qualified applicants remains the same size.
If you don't have a college degree, you're going to have to take a job that sucks. If it sucks and is also dangerous (e.g. logging or commercial fishing), it pays more than if it just sucks (retail or waitressing).
If you compare people in the same professions, with the same experience, with the same education who work the same number of hours, the pay gap goes away. And you don't have to take my word for it. (see page 16)