Assignment 4: Gender and Career & Boys and Girls

Although I have some vague idea that I’d like to become a professor ‘when I grow up’, the question of what exactly I would teach is still very much up in the air. I haven’t been able to narrow my area of interest within my major down any further than Japanese culture; within that culture, I’m interested in religion, pop culture, and issues of race and gender. I think many of the courses in the Women’s Studies program would apply, from general courses on women’s issues such as Body Image VS. Reality (WS 3413) and Women’s Health (WS 4243) to courses like Women and World Politics (WS 3563) which might deal specifically with women’s issues in other parts of the world. I am also interested in the course Motherhood in Society (WS 3810); I think this sounds like a useful course for any woman who wants to have both a career and a family.

I have only had two part-time jobs so far, but both of them have been somewhat stereotypical “female” jobs, and most of my coworkers were women. In high school I had a secretarial-type job at OU’s Center for Independent and Distance Learning. The majority of other office workers and teachers with whom I worked were older women—out of the four administrators who I regularly interacted with, though, only one was a woman. While it was usually a very friendly place to work and the office workers were treated with respect, I can’t believe that this was just a coincidence. Now I work at the History of Science department at OU’s library; as it is a library job, it’s probably not surprising that nearly all of my coworkers and even my boss are women. However, administration of the department is split between a woman and a man.

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For the most part, I found that this week’s chapters from Feminism is for Everybody simply reaffirmed my beliefs. It is clear to me that feminism has to be about more than making women ‘equal’ to men—it must also be about making women equal to each other. I don’t think you can support equal rights for women without supporting gay rights or equal rights for members of under-privileged classes or minority races, religions and ethnicities—because don’t women exist in all these groups? In fact—at the risk of being labeled a dangerous liberal nut—I would even go so far as to say that I don’t see why women deserve equal rights any more or less than any other group of under-privileged human beings…

The other two readings were both eye-openers for me. The Will to Change filled me with this crazy urge to have a little boy of my own just so that maybe I could raise him to ‘not’ be utterly twisted and miserable, and Reviving Ophelia shocked me into realizing just how much I’ve changed since I was nine years old. As a child I was tomboyish, overconfident, disobedient, intensely creative… I am none of these things now, but I can hardly remember anymore why the change occurred, or when. I wonder if all my classmates have changed as much as I have in the past ten years?