huMANity

In class lately we have been talking about how the view of women and what their place is in the home. This has cause me to be more aware of the little comments I find I normally world have over looked as "playful". What really got to me occurred after we had received the Thoughts on Women- A Timeline. I was talking with a few friends in AP about some of the quotes on the paper and we decided to share them with another friend that is not in the same english as we are. I was shocked when I found out that some of my guy friends actually thought there was some validity in what the quotes were saying. The one quoth that they seemed to particularly like was from 1483- 1546 Martin Luther "Girls begin to talk and stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops." when I first read that quote I just passed it off as one of those comments that men say to make themselves feel better about the fact that girls develop faster than boys do, but when they brought up this quote in our discussion I listened a little more closely to see what they thought of it. I then found myself being attackes. One of the boys used to quote to enforce a point he had been trying to make in telling me I was wrong in my thinking about an argument from the day before. All of the other boys agreed with him and gave examples of their own struggles with trying to get the "weed" to understand their correct point. This caused me to feel very defensive of my gender. We ended the conversation but the feeling it gave me did not die off as easily. I looked at some of the other quotes on the paper and wondered which other ones my guy friends agreed with. The quotes from the Senate in the early 1900's seemed to be reflected in my friends as well. In stage crew this year, the manager was a female. All of the boys could not stand that they had to take orders from a girl about how to build and use power tools. They kept saying that she was to nice to get anything done and she knew nothing about what she was doing. The boys actually went as far as saying that none of the other girls in stage crew could touch the power tools because they would screw the projects up. They were generalizing horribly with this thinking. There was one girl who could not figure out how to do the builgin aspect of the projects and they roped the rest of the girls in with her and would not let them touch anything. They thought that because a girl was in power that everything would fall apart. I wonder if this is what society is afraid of when it comes to leading our government. If you look back on our presidential history you will find that not once have we had a women president. And not until the most recent election had the people even considered getting a womans name on the ballot. Even though we made that huge jump, we still ended up with a male president. We may be a very advanced country but restricting ourselves to men will get us nowhere. We have trusted the country to me for so long and look what good that did us. Maybe the perspective of a woman is exactly what we need to try and get fully back to the wonderful place we once were, and possibly even go beyond that.