From Judith McDaniel
I have just finished grading another batch of reflective essays for my winter term online course in Women in Western Culture. My assignment included poems by Wordsworth and Yeats in which they “prayed” that their daughters would be attractive (but not too attractive), smart (but not too bright), and basically shy, retiring, and maleable to the men who would own them. In contrast, they read a poem by contemporary poet Minnie Bruce Pratt, written to her sons. The impulse for writing it, she says in her poem, was reading all that drivel by men about their daughters. What does she want for her sons? That they find mates who are their equals in everything and that they never expect or ask “for the weather, earth, angels, women, or other lives to obey you.”
My assignment was for them to examine Pratt’s poem and say what she wished for her sons and why she wanted it. Then I asked them to write a wish for their own sons or daughters. Simple, right?
A few of them mentioned Yeats and Wordsworth, but not with any emotional energy. They paraphrased Pratt’s more general wishes for her sons (“that you’ll know good and do it”), and completely ignored any gender issues or components in her poem. When they wrote to their own children, and most did choose to write to a son or daughter, they wished for good health, opportunities to be successful, to be anything they wanted to be. Of my 21 students, only two saw that their sons might need different things from their daughters or vice versa. And one of those students was a teen mother who is raising a two-year-old son.
I could read this result a number of ways. One is that my assignment needs to be a lot more explicit if I want to draw out the reflections on gender that this course requires. Another could be that teen age college students are incredibly naive about gender and its effects on their lives. Or should I be giving them and their parents credit for raising a generation that has “overcome” gender as an issue?
I think my conclusion has to be that it is a bit of both. Gender has gone underground. Most of the young women in my class were told that they could be anything they wanted and their parents meant it. I did. But when they go out into the world, they will still meet salary differentials, gender expectations in job descriptions, and negative impact from the “mommy track.” In their personal lives, these young women will meet the men in my class who espouse a belief in gender equality but still expect, if push comes to shove, that their wives will make career sacrifices to care for their children.
How do I help them confront the complexities of gender issues that they have not yet experienced?
Tags: college students, gender, mommy-track
