Originally Posted by
chen bao jun
I am very feminine and always have been. I do like to dress and look like a lady, I love pink (it's my favorite color) and I've always loved doing all the stereotypical feminine things. I used to get flack for this, even from my own mother, who is really a tomboy (though she's 82. She climbed trees until her late 70's, something I can't even imagine trying). I went to boy's schools (I was like the second class of girls in my high school and we were a real minority and I went to an Ivy League really soon after they 'integrated') and all the other women were like, we should do everything just like men to prove we are as good as men, and I was like, I'm as good as anybody but I never wanted to be a man or be anything like a man in my life. I love being a girly girl. Period. Fullstop.
I never did find that wearing short hair and tailored clothes and refusing to have children until very late in life and all of the things they used to say we had to do 'not to let women down' actually made any professor or anyone else behave as if we were NOT women. If they were prejudiced against women, they were just as prejudiced against the ones in pants with no jewelry as they were against the ones wearing frills and pearls (me, even back in the 70's). the only way they got less prejudiced was by seeing you could do the work, which I always could. And THAT has nothing to do with what you are wearing or how you present. I was always one of the two or three with the best grades in the class and no one can argue with THAT.
I like to get on people's nerves. Recently I was on an oh-so-important board at my Ivy League school and here we were in the 2000s and all the women still all insecure and worried about not being treated well and all stiff in their little suits, pantsuits usually with short hair. I just sat at every board meeting wearing a dress and would pull my knitting out of a bag and knit and knit while everybody else pretended they were taking notes on their ipads. At the end my term they were like so shocked that I had also accomplished something they had been trying to get done for about 20 years and had made no headway on, ever--along with a lot of completed socks and hats (which I donate to orphans).
Too funny.
P.S. when I left the board several other people had started knitting during meetings.
Eleanor Roosevelt actually used to knit at meetings all the time. It focuses your attention, actually, to be doing something mindless with your hands. Men should take it up, too, in my opinion.
P.S.S.In my house growing up, my mom was the tomboy and my dad sewed the curtains and sewed my buttons back on and took me out shopping to accessorize my clothing (my mom can't stand doing that). Of course he also repaired the cars and pipes and worked out all the time so that he was solid muscle, and a perfectly masculine man.
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