The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

Gender Roles #1.0: Identifying My Biases

Isis The Scientist put up a post a couple of days ago that reminded me that I'm not progressing on my Gender Roles project as effectively as I wanted to.  Her post deals with a really bad idea for injuring rapists in the act proposed by a white female South African doctor.¹ The issue underlying Isis' article is that in parts of the world rape is used as a culturally sanctioned tool to intimidate and control women.  That's a huge issue, and a very complex one that I've briefly mentioned before.  Read Isis' article, and the articles and sources she links to.  It's a topic that I'll return to in a later post in this series, but for the moment I think I can best address it by aiming folks in the right direction.

Before I can get on with the business of looking at gender roles in the larger sense, it's necessary to identify my own influences and biases as well as I can.  My hope is that by doing this, I can begin to generalize my experiences into a basic framework that I can further develop as this series continues.² In order to do this, I'm encouraging and requesting reader contributions and comments.  A list of questions is at the end of each post that I would like for folks to answer.  (I'll also make those questions available as a .doc file to anyone who asks.)  I would also request that readers pass the questions on to others who might be willing to answer.  Submission details are at the end of the post.

Obviously, when I was six years old, I wasn't thinking about how gender roles were filled, so as I'm reconstructing things, I'm necessarily engaging in some speculation.  I'm also exposing to the world some of my rationalizations and opinions that I normally don't articulate outside of my own head.  Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong.  If you agree, let me know.  If you don't, that's a fair topic for discussion.  I'm not so wedded to my view of things that I'm unwilling to make adjustments.

I was born in 1969 in Louisville, Kentucky.  My mother is the youngest of five siblings - four girls and one boy, and my father had three sisters and a brother (who passed away as a child).  I have two brothers, one born in 1970 and the other born rather later in 1982.  Mom had been a legal secretary before marrying and having kids, after which she was mainly a stay-at-home mom until we started school, after which she often worked at our school in various capacities.  Dad was a psychologist working in social services, and he usually worked at least one part-time job during my childhood and also took classes while pursuing advanced degrees.  Thus, my earliest impressions were that dads (men) worked a lot outside of the home, and moms (women) usually stayed at home and raised the kids. There was little to challenge these impressions - mom sometimes took us to visit her sisters, all of whom had kids³ and all of whom always seemed to be home during the day while their husbands worked.  My dad's family we tended to see more on weekends when dad wasn't working, so the presence of my uncles at those visits was consistent with my early views.  Mom and dad were fairly forthright with the news that boys and girls were different, and answered the usual questions about what those differences were.  I understood at a fairly early age that it took both to make a baby and that it was always the mommy that actually gave birth to the baby, although the specific details weren't really explained to me until later.  There are physical differences between men and women that are relevant.

As I got a little older and started paying more attention to my surroundings, I became aware that there were deviations from the normal order of things.  I became aware that at least two women worked with my dad, one of whom I knew to be a secretary, and I became aware that there were women working  as nurses in the doctor's office where I had to go to get shots.  I also noticed that cashiers at the grocery store were women.  So now I knew that not all women stayed at home raising kids.  Some worked. I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at the time, but in retrospect it's clear that the working women that I'd encountered up to this point tended to work in what seemed to be supportive roles.⁴

When I started school (in the public school system), the bus drivers were women, all the teachers were women, and the principal of the school was a woman.  This represented the first time I'd encountered women in roles that were unmistakably authoritative.  It was possible for women to hold jobs that didn't require a male boss to be present. It was also possible for an entire building to have only women working in it.

Around this same time, I started to grasp the organizational structure of the Catholic parish that my family attended.  At that point, there were between two and four priests resident at the parish (not atypical for the time), and a small contingent of nuns who lived in the convent behind the parish school and who taught at the school.⁵ While women often led the congregation for songs, and not infrequently read the non-Gospel readings (only the priest, or a deacon, if there happened to be one, could read the Gospel reading), their roles tended to be minimal.  It was explained to me that only men could be priests, priests could not marry, and women could only be nuns (and nuns couldn't marry, either) and that was that.  There were, apparently, some roles that were reserved for men only, despite there being no obvious reason why that should be so.

In second grade, I switched to a different elementary school that had a male principal and one lone male teacher, proving basically that such roles could be filled equally well by any competent individual regardless of gender.  Also, while in the second grade, I made the discovery that not everyone in the world was Catholic, which in fairly short order led to a cascade of other realizations:  not everyone is religious, there are religions other than Christianity, some religions allowed their male clergy to marry and have families, some religions⁶ even allowed women to hold full pastoral roles, and more importantly (although once again I couldn't have articulated it this way), most, if not all, of the rules governing such roles were completely arbitrary.

Between second and fifth grade, I don't think there were many changes to my view of things.  I had probably been told at some point that "anyone can be anything they want if they just put their mind to it", and since I was in mixed classes, it seemed reasonable to assume that this was true.  The girls in my classes like Star Wars just as much as the boys,⁷ they liked the same music and the same TV shows; at least in the context of school, boys and girls were equivalent.  It was also in the fifth grade that I became aware that girls were interesting, and that the term girlfriend is much, much different from girl friend.

Sixth through Eighth grade was basically a long, drawn out elaboration of the girls are interesting realization, which was, of course, a consequence of the aforementioned relevance of the physical differences.  It's worth making a short digression at this point.

Humans are a sexually dimorphic species - males and females are obviously physically different.  Maybe there are some quantifiable cognitive differences too.  I don' t know.  There's a lot of ongoing research in that area.  That said, in a modern, industrialized society those differences don't amount to much.  Try as I might, I can't come up with a single role (other than roles ultimately related to reproduction) that requires the individual filling that role to be female or male to the exclusion of the other.

By high school, I'd worked out the notion that while there were certain roles that tended to be filled by men (such as police), and there were certain roles that tended to be filled by women (such as teachers), those roles were assigned more by social expectations than by anything else.  I had one male math teacher in the 11th grade who was a complete assclown and spent a lot of time berating the young women in the class that they should focus on getting their Mrs. degree.  He was not a terribly strong influence on me.

In engineering school, I found myself in an environment that at the time was around 80-90% male.  Several women from my high school went to college with me, and there ended up being a core group of maybe 10 women in my discipline.  We had some old-school professors (including one elderly professor who may well have helped invent thermodynamics...) who were vocal in their opinions that women should not be in engineering school.  One of these professors felt it was perfectly acceptable to offer women in his classes better grades in return for dates.  For the most part, though, there wasn't a lot of what I would clearly identify as gender discrimination in college.  I feel fairly confident in saying that by that point, the overwhelming majority of people who I found myself associating with had rejected outdated notions like "a woman's place is in the home" or "women should be barefoot and pregnant".

The engineering field and the work environment, in my experience, is still overwhelmingly male, and the government employment landscape is still, so far as I can tell, generally more male than female.  Both situations are changing.  Broadly speaking, younger employees seem to be more accepting of women in technical and oversight roles - I'd be surprised if it were otherwise.  Also not particularly shocking is that the older employees tend to cling more strongly to the notion that women are out-of-place in such roles (some of these folks are quite brazen about making their opinions known).  As the older generation moves into retirement, the balance should improve, although it's contingent upon how many women choose to enter the relevant fields.    

I've avoided saying much about religion up to this point, but I need to return to it.  The first time I actually read the Bible cover-to-cover was in high school, without the benefit of any background in Biblical history and without the availability of the internet to easily do things like compare different texts.⁸ As a not-remotely doctrinaire Catholic, I had no presupposition that the Bible was anything other than a collection of writings by a number of different authors, composed over some poorly defined time-frame.  The phrase "divinely inspired", to me, meant "the writers were motivated by their faith to write things down".  Prior to actually reading the Bible, I believed it was fairly harmonious and internally consistent.

That belief did not survive for very long - no longer than it took to get into the second chapter of Genesis, actually.  It also doesn't take long to realize that the Biblical writers didn't think much of women.  Again, this becomes pretty clear early in Genesis, and really doesn't let up.  There are occasional bright spots - Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well comes to mind - but it doesn't take long before you hit something like 1 Timothy which pretty much tells women to shut up and obey.  (1 Timothy is a forged document, by the way.  The polite term is pseudepigraph, but it's a forgery.  Somebody wrote it sort of in the style of Paul and slapped Paul's name on it to give it authority.  See Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, for example, for discussion of this.)  In any case, on balance, the Bible presents a rather bleak picture of women in society.  I can understand that as a facet of the social context of the time, but I reject the claim that the Bible represents a valid guide for gender roles in the 21^st century.

So.  That gets me from 1969 to today.  Hopefully there will be some questions.

Now - to the subject of specific feedback I would like from readers.

First off, I'd like for anyone who wishes to contribute to do so via e-mail to feedback@cleverbadger.net.  Anonymous submissions are fine, but I would ask that everyone include the following information:

• Sex
• Year of birth
• State of birth (if born in the U.S.) or country of birth
• Current state of residence (if in the U.S.) or country of residence
• Whether or not you grant permission for me to publish portions of your responses
• Whether you grant permission for me to publish your first name, or whether you would prefer that I refer to you by a pseudonym

Now, the questions:

• Describe the family in which you were raised - number and genders of children, parents' jobs, single or two parent household or some other family arrangement.
• What are your earliest recollections of distinctions between male and female gender roles?
• Describe your early schooling - public? private? homeschooled? classes segregated by gender or race? were the teachers male or female? what about the administration?
• Analogous questions for secondary schooling and college.
• Did you grow up in a religious family?  If so, did religion play an obvious role in your family's gender role expectations?  If not, do you know where your family's gender role expectations came from?
• How did any churches you attended as a child influence your views of gender roles?  If there were disconnects between your church and your family views, how did you resolve them?
• Have your views on gender roles changed as you've gotten older?  If so, to what do you attribute those changes?  Do you feel that you've gotten more progressive/liberal or more traditional/conservative?
• Do your current views on gender roles tend to agree or disagree with those of your family and close friends?
• Did gender role expectations play a role in your choice of careers or field(s) of study?
• If you are a woman, are you in a field that is traditionally considered "men's work"?  If so, do you feel that your gender has affected the way others view you in your field?  Do you feel that your gender has influenced advancement opportunities?
• If you are a male, are you in a field that is traditionally considered "women's work"? If so, do you feel that your gender has affected the way others view you in your field?  Do you feel that your gender has influenced advancement opportunities?
• Do you feel that there are certain roles that should be exclusively male or exclusively female?  What are they?  Why do you feel that this is the case?
• Please add any information or history that you consider to be relevant to your current views of gender roles that aren't specifically covered by the questions above.

-Jay
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¹The idea is bad not because it punishes rapists, but because it guarantees that the victims will end up faring even worse.

²This approach necessarily forces the discussion to center on my formative years of the 1970s and 1980s. It also skews the discussion heavily towards my own perspectives, unless readers contribute. Hint. Nudge.

³There was one exception - mom's oldest sister had a granddaughter who was just a few months younger than me. That aunt kept her granddaughter during the day, so while technically her own children were gone, she was still raising a child. I mention this just for the sake of accuracy.

⁴It will likely be pointed out that nurses are damned important, thankyouverymuch! I quite agree, but I was no more than 6 when I was forming these impressions. Even now, it seems more usual to refer to "doctors and nurses", which not so subtly reinforces a supportive status.

⁵By way of explanation for readers who aren't familiar with Catholic parishes, a typical parish circa 1976 would have one or more priests  living in a residence on the parish grounds.  Most parishes had schools associated with them, and classes were typically taught by nuns (which are the only female "clergy" in the Catholic Church).  Those nuns typically lived in a residence called a convent, which could either be on the parish grounds or somewhere else.  There are, as it happens, many different orders of priests and nuns, all of which have slightly different ways of doing business, but those differences aren't relevant at the moment.

⁶I go back and forth in my head a lot regarding whether I think it's correct to lump all the variations of Christianity together under a single heading or to consider them to be many different species (if you'll pardon the phrase).  There are, depending on where you get your information, hundreds or thousands of branches of Christianity, and they cover a sufficiently wide spectrum of beliefs that I don't think it's correct to say that they're all sufficiently alike to be interchangeable.  (See here for an illustration of one view of the situation.)  On the other hand, it's incredibly difficult to determine what the essential differences between groups even are.  So, for the purposes of this series of posts, I'm generally going to make the discriminating factor whether or not a group allows women in pastoral roles or not.

⁷Toy marketing was a different story. Star Wars toys around that time were marketed almost exclusively to boys, with one conspicuous exception. Kenner put out a line of "large size" figures - Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, the robots, and Princess Leia initially.  The Leia doll was unabashedly a fashion doll, despite being declared an action figure on the box.  Apparently under the impression that the girls playing with the Leia doll would be more interested in styling her hair than anything else, Kenner didn't even include the little gun that she used in the opening scenes of the film.  Kenner also put out a line of toys based on the Six Million Dollar Man TV show, which had lasers and guns and stuff.  The corresponding toys for the Bionic Woman show unsurprisingly had lots of outfits and hair stuff.  And a Bionic Beauty Salon.  Really.

⁸It's surprising how many people who consider themselves to be devoutly religious have never actually read the Bible all the way through, cover to cover.  Catholics, speaking from my own experience, hear one of several carefully selected subsets of Biblical readings depending on which liturgical year it happens to be.  The selections tend to exclude the really weird parts - readings from Revelation, for example, skip Rev. 1:13-16, which describes Jesus as having feet of brass and a sword sticking out of his mouth, or the parts of Rev. 21 that describe the city of New Jerusalem descending from the sky like some sort of Heavenly Borg Cube.   In any case, I think that if you're going to claim to hold the Bible in high regard, you have an obligation to know what's actually in it.  That means reading the whole thing, not just the good parts that tend to get read during church services.  It means reading stories of bears mauling children.  It means reading stories of parents giving their virgin daughters to crowds of horny strangers to be raped.  It means reading stories of women using sex to manipulate kings.  It also means reading the books in the Bible in the order that they were written - the Gospel of Mark before the Gospel of Matthew, for example, and it means taking the time to be at least minimally aware of the huge amounts of scholarship that have been developed about the Bible in the last hundred years or so.

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