APUSH Journal #6: Women Are Slowly Taking Over

“Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of ‘em graduate from college. They go into space and do everything men do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way- these females are going to leave us males in the dust.”-Ericsson from “The End of Men”

To me it is unfathomable how women were not given equal rights and social equality from the beginning. After learning about how deeply rooted racism was in our country, I found it extremely shocking how African American males got voting rights 50 years before white women did, and also how outlawing sex discrimination was only added to the civil rights bill to stop it from making race discrimination illegal! With that said, it is amazing how far we’ve come, yet also amazing how much further we have to go before truly reaching equality. After this unit, I was left feeling unsure; should I pity myself for being a girl because of the way the media portrays us and the expectations society holds us to? Or should I be proud because, it least economically, we are beginning to race ahead? I started out pessimistic, but now I see there really are things to be hopeful about.

People are predicting now that women are starting to catch up with men, and will soon control the economy. Things are changing; “thinking and communication have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina”, so women are no longer biologically handicapped- in fact, women tend to be better at that kind of stuff! We are more social, flexible, focused, and considerate, and now we are the final ingredient: empowered. Although still present, the wage gap is slowly closing, and more and more women are going into previously male-dominated careers. Women were not hit nearly as hard by the recession, and for the first time women hold the majority of jobs in the US, which reading about gave me great pride. The fact that a country’s economic success seems to be so closely tied to women’s involvement in the work force and government shows our power, and should give more incentive for true equality to be met! There may be more women in college now, but there still needs to be more women in politics; we’re moving in the right direction, but we are definitely not there yet.

Before we delved into how brainwashing and horrible the media is towards and about girls, I felt like we had basically reached equality. My whole life I have felt that I have had the same opportunities as boys; I don’t fear not getting a job or not getting into college because I’m a girl, I could technically try out for wrestling if I chose to, I don’t feel pressure to take my husband’s name if and when I get married, etc., etc. I obviously notice the slight inequalities and the very prevalent gender stereotypes, but I don’t feel that those are really holding me back at all. This was not so true for my mom’s generation. In high school she did sports like cheer leading and synchronized swimming because most sports were not available to girls. Now I play soccer and lacrosse (although our uniforms still consist of skirts and we are not allowed to check people like in boys lacrosse), and although I do not exercise it, I do have the right to try out for boys-only teams like football. Also, when my mom was in high school, all girls were required to take home economics while boys were required to take wood working and metal shop- classes we don’t even have at Sharon High School! My grandma, who never went to college and was “actually incredibly subservient now that [my mom thought] about it” wanted my mom to become a real-estate agent or an art teacher- but she wanted to follow her father and go into business. Now I really don’t think there are anymore guidelines for what females can be- in fact I think there are far greater barriers for males! I feel like it is far weirder for a guy to want to be a nurse, or a dancer, or a stay-at-home dad, than it is for a girl to want to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a police officer. When I read the quote “What’s college? That’s where girls who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives cooking and sewing” in a Digital History reading I realized that that was sort of what my mom did! I mean, she didn’t mind becoming a stay-at-home mom, but I feel like all those years of college and graduate school were wasted because she just chose to fold laundry and cook for the rest of her life! Maybe I’m just against it because that is not something I would ever want for myself, but the fact that it’s not just expected that I become a housewife is something to be proud of I guess.

As more women start to compete- and win against men, I believe these gender stereotypes we are so accustomed to will begin to fade away. Everything should be “equal opportunity”, and being a feminist I would like to focus on all the ways we have not yet reached that, but I’m happy to say that I actually believe we are inching closer.

LC Exercise #6 Part 2: Just Friends?

I believe that females and males can just be friends without the possibility of it becoming more, although I will admit that this is quite rare. For the most part I actually believe that there is always it least a tiny bit of attraction or flirtation between girls and guys, and that idea of maybe making it into something more is always in the back of people’s mind, even if it’s only a teeny tiny possibility/desire. There are those few people though that aren’t like that, you really truly only see them in that friend light, not because they’re not great, but because you really only think of them as more of a brother or sister. You could like them so much, but the idea of becoming more is almost gross to you! Almost everyone I talked to about it agreed with me; it is definitely possible to for girls and guys to just be friends. On Facebook I posted a poll and 11 out of the 12 people who answered said they could, and most of them justified it the same way: “you just don’t see some people like that”.

Brett: UNSURE

Originally he answered that they can be friends, but later slightly changed his answer… “I thought about the question more… It’s not that easy of one to answer if you think of it more… I think that on a macro scale it’s probably true that you can just be friends, but that’s only because other love options are available- I think if you put a male and a female on a deserted island, they’d either fall in love or kill each other!”

Ilana: CAN BE FRIENDS

“I don’t know… it’s just- you don’t find every guy you’re friends with attractive! You may be good friends with someone, but still never see yourself in a relationship with them or anything.”

Bryan: CAN BE FRIENDS

“I understand how a lot of times people start going out because they were originally friends, but not everyone you’re friends with is someone you would go out with. I may like a lot of things about a person, but that doesn’t mean necessarily that I’ll start to like them.”

Jacqui: CAN’T BE FRIENDS

Jacqui was the only person I found who doesn’t think that females and males can only be friends; her point was that if you’re friends with someone, you must like a lot of things about them, and if they’re of the opposite sex, then you’re most likely going to develop feelings for them. “Well I just think that whether or not you’re attracted to someone you become friends with them because you enjoy their company, and then finding more in common and other aspects of them that you like makes them attractive and then… ba-da-bing ba-da-boom: love!”

Raichel: CAN BE FRIENDS

Raichel had a hard time explaining her point of view, but basically what I think she was trying to get at was that you can’t like everyone enough to want a relationship with them; some people you just like less than others, but you can still be friends. “There are just some guys that you don’t hate but that you would never want something more with!”

LC Exercise #6 Part 1: "F is for Friends Who Do Stuff Together"

1. Purposely get lost in Boston and have to find our way back

2. Go to the movies with a blindfold on and draw what we think the main character looks like afterwards

3. Go “coning” at McDonald’s (order a soft serve cone at the drive through and only take the ice cream not the entire cone)

4. Sleepover in a random place like at Ames Street Playground, Borderland, or one of the sheds for sale at this place in Cobb Corner (not sure how legal this is…)

5. Build our own tree house

6. Go cow tipping!

There are literally so many things that we’ve said we want to do but have never actually done. This is mostly because they’re really weird or hard to do, but some of them actually are pretty doable I realized, so we really needed this to get us to actually go through with it. I decided to try the exercise with my two best friends, Payal and Raichel, and also Jared, Brett, and Eric because we hang out basically every weekend, but never do any of the things we say we want to, and instead just end up just at someone’s house normally. It took us forever to come up with this list, even though we’ve definitely said maybe a million different things that we should try one day- so these are only the few that we could remember. We could definitely do more things like this, just somehow we always end up just hanging out normally because it’s the least effort. Without a doubt though, we will definitely start doing more activities like this because it’s worth the effort, and it’s really fun to switch it up sometimes.

Since a bunch of us finally had our licenses we decided that we just had to go “coning”, so one night we all drove all the way across town to McDonalds only to find that they ran out of ice cream…Of course, the one day we finally decide to try it. So we picked our next favorite on the list to try next time: getting lost in Boston. We took the train in, grabbed a late lunch, and literally just walked around until we found another subway station, got on that not knowing if it was inbound or outbound, got off at a random spot, walked around some more, and then after a while decided it was time to start finding our way back. It was really fun just not caring where we were going, not having a set destination, and just, you know, being kind of stupid and weird. We would try to find strange looking people and force each other to ask them for directions, or just close our eyes and spin in a circle to figure out which way we would go- just like random, funny things. At one point Payal dropped her water bottle accidentally and this random guy walking on the sidewalk screams out “NO!! WHAT A WASTE OF WATER! HOW COULD YOU!?”, just to be obnoxious, and the look on her face was maybe the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen. Later on the green line a group of drunk- and still drinking (on the subway)- college kids were trying to give us directions, and it was literally so entertaining. It was odd experiences like these that made it worth doing, and just being all together while these things were happening obviously made it even more amusing. Getting back home wasn’t very difficult since we knew the T pretty well, but it was still a fun process just because of the spontaneity.

Not much was really said that I can remember besides Raichel saying, “I’m glad you made us do this, Gabi!” and everyone agreeing, but it was obvious that everyone enjoyed themselves. Everyone also agreed that we should continue to add things to the list, and obviously continue to try and cross things off of it. Before I guess it was sort of laziness that prevented us from doing things like these, but now that we see how much of a success it can be we definitely have a lot more motivation to keep trying them. Instead of just hanging out, sometimes we can do something different and exciting like this.

APUSH Podcast #4: The Civil Rights Movement

In Clarence Taylor’s speech, he started by pointing out how the popular view of the Civil Rights Movement isn’t completely accurate, and I can definitely say that I originally had this view myself. I too thought that most of the civil rights issues were focused in the South since slavery was previously concentrated there, but the North needed to make some changes as well. Abolitionism may have begun there, but discrimination towards African Americans was also extremely prevalent. When we watched the documentary about the problems with desegregation in South Boston, I was completely shocked and ashamed by what happened there. Although learning about the unbelievable racism in America made me upset, thinking that it was mostly in the South made me feel slightly better, but after learning more about it, I lost that tiny bit of solace because African Americans struggled everywhere, including Massachusetts, a seemingly liberal state. I also previously thought that the Civil Rights Movement was mostly in the 60’s, when really it could be argued that it started as early as the 1890’s with the end of reconstruction. It is absolutely appalling and pathetic that it took America so many years to finally give African Americans the rights they deserved.

What ended this movement was ultimately the backlash from the spreading of the black power ideology. Things simply seemed too “crazy” at that time, so white Americans began to become more conservative, and a division between the different civil rights groups made them weaker. The black power movement allowed violence, which angered both whites and other African Americans working for the same goal in a non-violent way. Although I am not necessarily against violence in self-defense, to me it is very unfortunate that this is what caused the Civil Rights Movement to gradually disappear. There was still work to be done (as I’ll talk about later), yet their campaign lost the support it needed to be completely successful because they couldn’t agree on how exactly to win the rights that they all wanted. Even groups that both supported non-violence such as SNCC and SCLC were rivals to each other because they couldn’t agree on who would lead the movement, the group or specific individuals, as Taylor briefly talks about. The competition and lack of cooperation (which I understand was basically unavoidable) lead to too much disunity for the movement to continue on.

A major debate that I wished Clarence Taylor addressed further, was “phase four” of the Civil Rights Movement: “post-civil rights era”. Was the Civil Rights Movement successful? Before this class, I believed yes, but now I definitely believe we still have a ways to go before completely achieving racial equality. Many people believe it was a success because they ended legal discrimination, but Taylor argues that the movement had other goals as well such as ending economic and social discrimination for African Americans. This even today has not been accomplished, although America has made great progress. Taylor also reasons that although they did finally legally have rights, those rights were still commonly violated. Racism also still prevails in America, as much as we try to ignore that fact, or even deny it. For these reasons I have to say that I side with Clarence Taylor; it is the unfortunate truth that we cannot label this current time period the “post-civil rights era”. A positive from this though, is that it “helped spark other social protest movements” such as trying to obtain equal rights for all genders and sexual orientations.  The Civil Rights Movement should have continued though, as African Americans still face challenges because of their race that they shouldn’t have to.