I'm old, pushing 60, so I've been through some waves of feminism in my time
and I see some interesting recurrent themes cropping up here. I was a
Radical Feminist (that was a group) in my youth and we took great pains to
distinguish ourselves from what we called the Cultural Feminists. To us,
way
back in the early 70ies, the distinction had to do with whether we accepted
anything other than total change of gender roles. We wanted androgyny. We
thought that femininity as a set of social prescriptions was bad for women
and that masculinity was bad for men - and for the planet, etc. I still
think we had a point, but I've mellowed with age and understood that change
like that takes a very, very long time and that you have to figure out what
to do to make life better in the meantime...
At present, it seems to me that any biological notions about gender
differences are terribly dangerous because they threaten to put us back
into
the box of biological determinism my generation fought so hard to get out
of. So your description of your childhood would have been a sad story of a
girl considered "unnatural" by her culture rather than a story of good,
respectful parenting, which is what it sounds like. We had to fight to
prove
that we were not determined by our biology.
But time marched on and I came to see that there is also a role we can play
in celebrating the traditionally feminine (because there are pieces of it
in
almost all of us - and they have been mostly undervalued, though sometimes
in the guise of praise for "real" women) provided we do not consider it
more
"natural" than an alternative characteristics. I think we learned a lot
from
the Civil Rights Movement, which went through a similar change and started
to insist on valuing the particularly (even "typically") African American,
rather than considering it a form of stereotyping to notice it.
So I learned to live with a little more ambiguity. I now think that we need
to invite girls who love their Barbies into the technological universe,
make
a place for them that builds on their strengths and interests, as well as
making sure that any girl like you, who is not bound by tradition, feels
appropriately at home in that same universe. We need to foster the
curiosity
and spirit of non-traditional girls - but we also need to make room for the
more traditional ones. Some people want to depend on others to solve
technical problems. They prefer problems of another kind. As long as we
don't insist that only biological males can love and understand technical
problems, we don't have to insist that it's somehow not kosher to want to
be
a mere "end user." It turns out that all kinds of skills and interests are
needed to make technology serve us and out planet well. I agree that we
have
a lot of work to do to invite everybody into that universe - and that all
sorts of efforts make sense, from those who foster paradigm-shifting new
ideas to those that simply give an under-served and under-represented group
a leg up...
Cornelia Brunner
<cbrunner@edc.org>
on 7/18/01 11:17 AM, Digital Sister at director@digital-sistas.org wrote:
I must agree with Cornelia. The issue is not biological it is
socialization.I learned about technology not because my mother was
interested but because I was. I was a competitor so I competed with the
boys in everything and
that included video games(Atari, my time frame) and when the pc's were
really
out in the homes I competed with the fellas with the biggest, fastest and
best
machine.
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