One Response on Dated attitudes towards gender ‘holding schoolgirls back’

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  By k.osivwemu at June 20th, 2009

  I write primarily as mother in that as my youngest daughter said’you have been going to primary school fairs for 24 years!’with this qualification I find that my experience as parent has not changed in that time. Gender steretypes are still applied to my daughters in the way they were to me. Now I would go so far as to say these stereotypes also encompass raced stereotypes. The struggles I had to be a good athlete as well as student have been relived in the lives of my daughters. The thing I would has changed has been the discussion I can have with them as girls and young women. Whereas I would feel cross at being called a ‘man-woman’ for running faster than the boys and doing better in tests and had no-one to talk to about it; we now have a body of skilled girls and women who can talk about it. How we live gendered and raced lives is a conversation I can have with colleagues, friends and daughters. To my mind we have achieved part of the task Martin Luther King presented – to create a language that means we can communicate what is happening. We need to continue with this work through the Webs.