Assignment 2

I interviewed my grandmother about her experiences with gender through the years. She experienced many gender issues, especially when she got divorced around 1970 with three children at home. My grandmother was a 3rd grade teacher and growing up she said all of her teachers were men. Women weren't allowed to teach when she was in grade school, but now teaching is stereotyped as woman's job. My grandmother never experienced higher education issues for her parents were both college graduates as was she and my grandfather. She was not allowed to have a credit card and being divorced was highly frowned upon. My grandfather was able to sign loans in her name, without her consent. She describes feminism as women being equal to men. 

When I was in the eighth grade my friends and I tried to play football for our school. We were always the prissy athletic girls, but we loved to proved to our guy friends that we were just as tough as they were. Our team had many injuries that year, and were losing many games. We had always played sports and our basketball team was the strongest team in the school along with track. We followed through and asked to play football. The coach said he would consider it (they had already had a female kicker a few years before we were in middle school) and let us know. He spoke to his female coworker who loves sports and she said no. She shouldn't have a say in it, but she did. He told us he strongly considered it but it was so late in the season and since we had never played we would have a hard time learning all of the plays. To this day, I really think he would have let us because we were almost more athletic than our guys, but because the female teacher said no we couldn't. You would think that she would like to see a girl in that position.... clearly not.

Readings: The F-Word has a passage in chapter three that goes along with my experience trying to play football. It states that you can care about your looks and take pride in them while being a feminist. "A feminist wants the best for both sexes and doesn't want either sex to be discriminated against." My school, as I've already stated, had a girl play football before but she was only a kicker. There are rules in football about contact with a kicker, so it wasn't quite a big deal. My prissy friends and I wanted to play and prove that we were just as tough of athletes, but we also wanted to help the guys win because they weren't winning and most of our best players were hurt.