{"id":1329,"date":"2005-01-27T08:23:40","date_gmt":"2005-01-27T16:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/01\/27\/guest-post-by-mary-schweitzer\/"},"modified":"2005-01-27T08:23:40","modified_gmt":"2005-01-27T16:23:40","slug":"guest-post-by-mary-schweitzer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1329","title":{"rendered":"Guest post by Mary Schweitzer"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is a post written by Mary Schweitzer, for a email-list I lurk on. I’m posting this here with Mary’s kind permission. – Amp]<\/em><\/p>\n

Anecdote: During World War II, when employers had to hire women for “men’s” jobs, it was pointed out that a lot of farm women do a lot of hard, physical work all the time.<\/p>\n

I recall (it’s somewhere in my master’s thesis, could be in the JEH paper from 1980) a report in the Women’s Bureau (a wonderful source) about how men assumed that a BIG woman (read: fat) would be strong, and a skinny woman would be weak. That is, they projected unto women’s bodies what a “strong man” looks like and what a “weak man” looks like.<\/p>\n

However, the report noted, to everyone’s surprise it was the scrawny farm women who were the strongest.<\/p>\n

Now, today we know that when women do weightlifting (like the Nautilus circuit, not like power lifting) they don’t get BIG. They get … kinda scrawny, if you want to look at it that way (in today’s society, they get the type of figure that is “in” for the moment) (well, “in” if it also has tits and ass tacked on to either side — but your basic Hooters girl or USC “song girl” — they don’t call them cheerleaders at USC – will do the Nautilus circuit to get small and tight, then add on the tits and sometimes even a fake butt. The fake butt is all toward the back — for waggling — big hips, which supposedly represent childbearing capabilities, are also on the undesirable list. One could hypothesize that the current male affinity for a woman who is simultaneously tightly muscular (again, not weightlifting muscular), has big jugs, an butt that “looks good” in shorts or tight pants but is not wide enough to signify childbearing — shows they are looking for a playmate who can also be Mom.<\/p>\n

In other words — women’s muscles do not build OUT like men’s do — they get more tight.<\/p>\n

But men didn’t “see” that (although it was all around them) because they assumed that a woman who shared a particular characteristic (such as physical strength) with men must LOOK like a man.<\/p>\n

That digression aside, the point remains that (1) an awful lot of farmwomen used to do very hard physical labor, but nobody seems to remember that; and (2) men assumed that the visual characteristics of strength in a man would be identical in a woman.<\/p>\n

It was not that women could not be strong — they ended up doing a lot more tasks during World War II than the men had ever thought them capable of — but that men had not been sufficiently observant to notice the women around them who WERE physically strong.<\/p>\n

I remember when women’s basketball was played half-court. That wasn’t that long ago.<\/p>\n

Just about any “evidence” these guys have that women “can’t do” something men can do has historically been socially constructed.<\/p>\n

And the PET scan studies that supposedly show that men use a different part of their brain for problem-solving than women is a tautology — if you are TAUGHT to approach problems in a certain way, then the part of your brain that corresponds to what you were TAUGHT to use is going to light up in a PET scan — it does not prove anything genetic; does perhaps demonstrate something very interesting sociological.<\/p>\n

Finally, as I was trying to get across with the (personal) story of the embarrassed 13-year-old who was considered a freak of nature because she tested higher than ANY 13-year-old boy in a study of spatial reasoning ability — as long as there are SOME women who don’t fit the stereotype — they may claim these women are the tail on the “bell curve,” but they have no way to prove it — AND, what they CANNOT say, is that NO woman can do XYZ.<\/p>\n

As long as they cannot say NO woman can do it, and as long as significant differences remain in the way boys and girls are raised (particularly when you look at TV — jeez!), and in the expectations society has for men and women, they have no way to tell HOW MANY OTHER women could do it, were the social assumptions and constraints differently.<\/p>\n

Yes, women have babies and men don’t. Women can breast feed. That’s about it.<\/p>\n

My son spends more time raising his daughter than his wife does (there’s a day are center where he works, plus she is a social worker in Florida and is grossly overworked). But he is in a career path and no one has denied him promotion or chances for self-improvement because he happens to be the one who spends more time with his daughter. Were he to get an opportunity to move up, nobody would ask in the interview “What are you going to do about the kid?”<\/p>\n

Nobody would ask him “Are you planning to have more children?” They’re not supposed to be able to ask us that, but they do, don’t they?<\/p>\n

The degree to which social constructions of gender differences impacts expectations and behavior is so very very great, that whatever biological differences there may be are swallowed up by it. (For that matter, nobody discusses the biological differences AMONG men and AMONG women.)<\/p>\n

One more example and I will quit: In 17th century New England, men were the guardians of religion. The male head of the household was legally charged with educating his household (including servants) to a minimal level of literacy, but also by reading the bible to them and literally making sermons TO them. WOMEN were not considered to be biologically (or theologically) capable of understanding scripture (the Society of Friends — Quakers — believed th opposite — women were human beings, all human beings were the same in the eyes of the Lord, so women could be both ministers and even missionaries, which is how Quaker women ended up getting hung in New England …)<\/p>\n

Two centuries later, in the 19th century, it was accepted as an OBVIOUS fact that WOMEN were the guardians of religion, morality, all things “home,” and they had a duty to protect men from internalizing the harshness of the commercial world. (The favorite fictional account of a male\/female relationship would have the woman “saving” the man from his self-centeredness, the product of participating in that cold, harsh outside world.) Conversely, women were supposed to stay OUT of that cold, harsh, outside world because not only was it not in their “character” to be able to participate in competitive endeavors of that sort, BUT IT WOULD DESTROY THE VERY FABRIC OF SOCIETY IF THEY TRIED.<\/p>\n

Spend an evening with 1950s-60s sitcoms on TVLand or some similar channel — it is hard not to be beat over the head with the obsession that women are creature from another planet. That was all part of an enormous societal push to try to squeeze women back to pre-World War II conceptualizations of what they could, and could not, do — by the pretense that women were “better” at household work than men (when men tried to run the house they always screwed it up) the converse message was being subtly — and sometimes not so subtly — being sent — women would screw things up in the outside world. This defying the statistics that showed a steady progression of even married women (and women with older children) in the market place.<\/p>\n

With the lens of a historian, this is all very much the short run. We are not so far removed from this deliberate effort at amnesia (forgetting what women did in World War II, forgetting what we know farmwomen always did) that any hypothesis about what women are “suited” for, as opposed to what men are “suited” for, that one can be in any way certain that even a study designed to show the “real” gender differences does not have socially constructed biases built into it.<\/p>\n

One more thing — I was interrupted in writing this email by a friend who was meeting with one of the women behind the book, “Out Bodies Our Selves.” That was a very radicalizing book at the time, because I don’t think any of us (I was about 19 or 20 when it came out) REALIZED how little we knew about our bodies, or ourselves. They are putting out a new edition, and will also have a website. Send your students there, because they are back in that world of ignorance where we once were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This is a post written by Mary Schweitzer, for a email-list I lurk on. I’m posting this here with Mary’s kind permission. – Amp] Anecdote: During World War II, when employers had to hire women for “men’s” jobs, it was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}