English+Gender+Essay

Abby Darlington 4/3/11 English 8E-4 *Gender Essay    “Don’t you want to hit from the ladies tees?” the boys on the golf team chuckled as my mom placed her golf ball on the tee, and took a good swing. For my mom, being the only girl on her high school golf team was hard, especially since all of the boys judged her before she even started playing. It wasn’t as if she had joined the // boy’s // golf team, but there was only one team, she was the only girl good enough to make it after trying out.  While my mom was in public high school (she later transferred to catholic school because of an // issue // with gender), there were many ways that genders were split up. In gym, because they were separated by ability, in sports, and in classes by teachers.  My mom didn’t have many issues with gender, but the one that caused her parents to move her from public to catholic school was when she was walking down the hallway in school, and three tall boys pulled her into the boy’s bathroom, and just stood over her, laughing. She was in there for a while, because they wouldn’t let her leave. She was so freaked by the incident that when she told her parents, they let her switch schools.  My grandmother was a chemist, and when she started having children, she was expected to just quit her job and stay home and watch my mother, and her two brothers, and sister, while my grandfather made money for the family.  Gender has come a long way since then. Nowadays there are many families that have two working parents, and women are paid almost as equally as men. I’m not saying that there still isn’t discrimination between genders, but it has improved quite a lot! Until 1920 women didn’t even have the right to vote, had to marry young, and start a family, wear skirts and dresses (I’m not even sure if people manufactured pants for women), and it didn’t matter whether or not they did well in school because everyone knew they weren’t going to have a job anyways.  When east took a trip to the Neuberger Museum, there were pictures taken by a photographer of a woman doll set up in a doll house. These photos of the rooms intrigued me, because they were based in the 1980s, and everything the woman of the family was supposed to do was so different. She was cleaning the house, cooking in the kitchen, waiting on the couch with the newspaper lying open, beside her for her husband to get home (she wasn’t allowed to actually read it), and doing many other things that the typical-woman of that era would do. I found this so be very stereotypical, but that was the point of the artwork. The objective of the artwork was probably to show how far women have come since then, probably, since the artist was a woman.  Today there is a common analogy used for women in the work place. It’s called the glass ceiling, and it basically says that women are always beneath the glass ceiling, and no matter how hard they try to get a higher position with their company, they’ll never be able to just because they’re women; they can only wish for it. Some companies try to change that, but personally I think there is some major work that needs to be done about women, and jobs.  Gender shouldn’t change how you view someone, how someone gets treated in a job, or what behaviors someone is expected to have. I hope that these problems can be fixed, so that over time women are treated exactly like men- if not, // better. //  